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From the Los Angeles Times

Determined federal prosecutor targets the Tijuana cartel

U.S. Atty. Laura Duffy gets much of the credit for crippling it, and now she vows to shut it down for good.

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

September 27, 2010

Reporting from San Diego

The Mexican drug kingpin was shackled to the railing of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter cruising up the coast of Baja California when he saw a curious sight: A hovering helicopter lowering somebody by rope onto the deck of a nearby boat.

The dangling person in the green flight suit was Laura Duffy, a federal prosecutor from San Diego. She had come after getting word that U.S. authorities had arrested the kingpin, Javier Arellano Felix, aboard his yacht on the Gulf of California.

Duffy, a blue-eyed 47-year-old, questioned Arellano Felix that day, but it was her air-drop entry that made a lasting impression. Throughout the case that culminated in 2007 with his being sentenced to life behind bars, Arellano Felix referred to Duffy as La Mujer del Cielo, the woman from the sky.

"I'm sure my client didn't realize that this young, attractive woman had immense power and authority in regards to his criminal prosecution," said David Bartick, the defense attorney for Arellano Felix.

Duffy is now the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, her handling of the sweeping case targeting the Arellano Felix drug cartel having eased her way through the appointment process with unanimous congressional approval and high expectations to keep the pressure on organized crime groups in Baja California.

By many measures, it seems a futile task. U.S. government efforts to target top Mexican kingpins have largely failed to diminish the power of Mexico's drug cartels, with each capture and conviction seeming only to spawn new, even deadlier crime bosses who are expanding their reach across Mexico.

But the U.S. prosecution of the Arellano Felix cartel, also known as the Tijuana cartel, has been a rare, albeit qualified, success story, leading to the imprisonment of most of its leaders and leaving the once powerful organized crime group severely weakened, if not dismantled.

Duffy, who headed the prosecution team, gets much of the credit from U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials. An Iowa-born mother of one, Duffy cut her teeth prosecuting heroin, marijuana and steroid trafficking rings before taking on the Arellano Felix case, which has lasted more than a decade.

The U.S. attorney in the Southern District, which covers San Diego and Imperial counties, is mainly responsible for managing the enormous caseload of illegal immigration prosecutions, a policy that Duffy is expected to continue.

But her high-profile experience suggests that the Obama administration wants to continue the aggressive pursuit of top Mexican drug traffickers. Duffy, who took office in June and was formally sworn in earlier this month, wasted no time establishing herself as a formidable force.

Flanked by top federal and local law enforcement officials at her first news conference in July, she announced an indictment targeting the remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel. The investigation snared 31 suspects, including a top Baja California state law enforcement official who was arrested in San Diego on his way to a meeting with his U.S. counterparts.

"The members of the Arellano Felix cartel who have been indicted and convicted ... are some of the most violent organized crime figures this region of the country has ever seen," Duffy said in a written response to questions. "I am committed to cleaning up the remains of the Arellano Felix cartel and turning our attention to those who seek to take over where it left off."

Duffy is widely respected in San Diego legal circles and considered a no-nonsense prosecutor, a perfectionist who demands the same from others. "You can see that this is going to be an incredibly high-powered administration," San Diego County Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis said at the news conference.

But although Duffy's derring-do has achieved near myth-making proportions — her airdrop experience was recounted at a congressional hearing in May — some analysts question whether prosecutions, although disruptive in the short term, make a difference overall.

The Arellano Felix cartel may be on its last legs, but other organized crime groups are probably jockeying to fill the void, they say. And the cartel contributed greatly to its own demise, earning the wrath of rival cartels and the Mexican government, which provided U.S. prosecutors with extraordinary cooperation.

"The [cartel] was not just a target of U.S. law enforcement, but also a target of its enemies," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "It's quite likely that U.S. and Mexican law enforcement benefitted from the animosity that other cartels felt" toward the Arellano Felix cartel.

Duffy, who went to law school at Creighton University in Nebraska, joined the U.S. Department of Justice in 1993 and quickly made her mark handling narcotics cases. She oversaw or led the prosecutions of Mexican Mafia members, Colombian heroin traffickers, Mexican veterinarians peddling anabolic steroid and others.

In the late 1990s she joined the Drug Enforcement Administration-led task force targeting the Arellano Felix cartel. Led by brothers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa — among them Benjamin, the reputed mastermind; Ramon, the enforcer; and Javier, the hard-partying young brother — the organization had turned Baja California into a major staging ground for drug smuggling into California.

The indictment announced in 2003 could serve as a grim boilerplate of criminality for modern Mexican organized crime, detailing a 16-year reign of terror that catapulted the cartel to the heights of narco-power. The brothers and several associates were charged with torturing, kidnapping and murdering rivals, attempting to trade arms for cocaine with Colombian rebels, systemically bribing Mexican authorities and stockpiling hundreds of high-powered weapons.

During the investigation, many witnesses, informants and Mexican law enforcement officials working with the task force were intimidated, tortured or killed, including Jose Patino Moreno, a crusading Mexican federal prosecutor whose head was crushed by an industrial press in 2000.

"His murder affected us all. Laura and I worked with him," said San Diego County Superior Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the prosecution team at the time. The tragedy, he said, only stiffened Duffy's resolve. "She didn't flinch.... She didn't allow that to make her rethink whether or not she should continue with the case. She persisted."

Over the years, several cartel suspects were captured and extradited, but the brothers remained out of reach. Benjamin was arrested and jailed in Mexico in 2002. Ramon was gunned down in Mazatlan the same year. Another brother, Eduardo, went into hiding.

When Javier Arellano Felix was intercepted in 2006 on his sportfishing boat, which was being tracked by the DEA through a global positioning system device, Duffy boarded the helicopter in San Diego. Soon after being lowered 150 feet from the helicopter, she was on the Coast Guard cutter, sitting across the table from the trafficker. He was wearing a tank top and flip-flops. Duffy offered him a soft drink and introduced herself.

"That kind of shows the grittiness of Laura Duffy, literally dropping herself from a helicopter," said Bartick, the defense attorney. "She took advantage of an opportunity to talk to him before he received legal representation."

Arellano Felix is one of seven cartel associates who have been sentenced in recent years. His brothers Benjamin and Eduardo are jailed in Mexico and are being sought for extradition.

In Tijuana, meanwhile, the organization's leadership has passed to a nephew of the brothers, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, who has found himself in Duffy's cross-hairs. The indictment she announced in July targeted dozens of his crew members. It's not clear if Sanchez Arellano himself has been indicted . Duffy wouldn't comment on his status.

Some authorities believe the young man has fled Tijuana. Others think he is flourishing as he revives his uncles' legacy. For some, the Tijuana cartel will survive so long as the Arellano name lives on.

Duffy appears to be trying to erase it.

In the indictment against the nephew's gang, it is referred to as the Fernando Sanchez Organization. Conspicuously absent is the infamous name: Arellano.

"The [Arellano Felix cartel] as we've known it no longer does exist," Duffy said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fed-prosecutor-20100912,0,5060304,print.story

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With son behind bars, mother wages battles for his education

She took on successive bureaucracies, demanding a proper education for Michael while he sat in juvenile hall and then county jail, his learning stagnating as he awaited trial. Now that he's in state prison, another fight may be on the horizon.

By Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times

September 28, 2010

Yamileth Fuentes constantly worried about her son Michael's education.

As the mother of a child with learning disabilities, she made sure he didn't get overlooked in school. She fretted when his math worksheets weren't challenging enough, or when his spelling slipped.

The energetic 42-year-old Metro bus driver wasn't afraid to fight on her son's behalf. She enlisted the help of clergymen, bureaucrats and an army of lawyers in the battle to get Michael a proper education. Once, she even stopped her bus to confront the mayor when she spotted him giving a news conference on a downtown street corner.

She believed, as countless other parents do, that her child should be given every opportunity to succeed.

Even if he was sitting behind bars, accused of murder.

::

Yamileth was 21 when she gave birth to Michael Garcia, her third child. He was a boy who loved to dance, was scared of thunder and didn't like being alone.

When he was still very young, Yamileth began noticing oddities in the way Michael spoke. He had trouble finding the right words and sounds, and his sentences were a jumble. Kids teased him about it. In elementary school, he was diagnosed with a speech and language impairment and an auditory processing disorder.

Michael never liked the special education label. It's just that you have a different way of learning, Yamileth told him. But the attention seemed to make him feel inadequate. He grew frustrated and started cutting class.

As adolescence kicked in, Michael slipped more and more out of control, becoming obsessed with girls and hanging out with friends Yamileth didn't know. But with her, he remained a devoted son.

He waited at bus stops after school, carrying Chinese takeout so that Yamileth, who worked 10-hour shifts without meal breaks, could get a bite to eat at the end of her route. He would quietly sit in the back of the bus for hours as streams of people got on and off, his shoulders swaying along with the bumps on the road. When they got home, he would take off her shoes and rub her feet, telling her every detail about his day.

::

In early 2006, Yamileth got a call from a detective looking for Michael.

He wanted to interview Michael about an incident the teen had witnessed, the detective told her. She didn't think much of it. Michael was picked up that afternoon.

Around 10 that night, her phone rang again. This time, the detective told her Michael was under arrest.

Authorities charged him with murder and attempted murder for two shootings in South Los Angeles.

In the first, a car-to-car shooting left a man dead and a woman wounded. Michael was accused of being in the gunman's car.

Six days later, gunshots were again ringing out in the streets when a frightened-looking teenager ran into a couple's backyard. A woman in the yard with her baby started screaming when she saw him. Her husband came running out.

"Let me in, they shot me," pleaded the teen, whom the husband and wife later identified as Michael.

When the husband tried to shove him out of the yard, Michael yelled at another teenager to shoot and kill the man, the couple testified. The other teen fired twice, grazing the man's buttocks, leading to the attempted murder charge.

Casings indicated the same gun was used in both incidents. Authorities believed the shootings were related to the Barrio Mojados gang. Michael, they said, was a member.

::

Yamileth quickly became a regular at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where she visited her son every weekend. She often still wore her blue bus driver's uniform and carried a lawn chair for the lengthy wait in the sun.

Michael was housed in the high security "compound," with an extra set of fences. Facing transfer to adult court, the teens in the compound were deemed too dangerous to come into contact with other juveniles, much less go to school with them.

Michael told his mother that classes inside the compound consisted of a couple of hours a day at the steel picnic tables where a teacher would pass out worksheets. She asked him to fold away one of the sheets to show her what he was learning. She was appalled to see single-digit addition for her 15-year-old son, who was in ninth grade before his arrest.

Yamileth started talking to other mothers in the visiting line, and with them formed a parent-teacher association for the compound. Probation officers took to calling Yamileth and two others who were always speaking up the "three amigas."

The parents, with chaplain Javier Stauring, met with attorneys at the Youth Law Center who demanded changes in the educational conditions at the compound. The county built modular classrooms and a secured path from the compound to the school facility to allow the youths to receive full days of instruction.

Michael started attending special education classes staffed by a teacher and an aide. Yamileth saw the changes in the longer, more coherent sentences he was writing in his letters.

::

That victory was short-lived. When Michael turned 18 in June 2008, a judge ordered him transferred to an adult lockup.

Meanwhile, the wait for his criminal trial stretched on as court dates were postponed month after month.

At one point after his transfer, Michael was attacked by other inmates who slung a rope around his neck and stuck a needle full of heroin in his arm. They suspected he was a snitch.

On their first visit after the attack, mother and son spent the hour crying. Michael tried to hide the wounds by pulling up his shirt, but Yamileth could see the bruises marring his neck, and his bloodshot eyes.

He was immediately transferred to protective custody at Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. Michael seemed to have gone through a profound change, his mother said.

"I'm not going to give up on myself," he told her. "God gave me a chance and it was for a reason."

But in the Central Jail, Michael's education stopped. Yamileth sent him novels, dictionaries and workbooks, and geared up for another battle. Attorneys from the Disability Rights Legal Center told her that as a special education student, Michael was entitled to public education until his 22nd birthday.

The second legal fight for Michael's education played out like a game of hot potato, with agency after agency claiming he wasn't their responsibility.

In a hearing before an administrative judge, the Los Angeles Unified School District argued it shouldn't have to provide education for inmates.

"The way they see it, it seemed, was 'He's facing so many years, what does he need an education for?' " Yamileth said. "But he wasn't even convicted. You don't know … if he's going to walk out the next day."

::

A few months later, Yamileth was at work when her phone rang.

It was Carly Munson, Michael's attorney with the Disability Rights Legal Center, with news of the judge's ruling. Her son was going to get an education.

Tears streamed down her face. A confused passenger who walked onto her bus told her he didn't have exact change for the fare. She waved him on. She couldn't care less.

The judge found that Michael had a desire to learn and work for a high school degree, and that he was being deprived of his right to free public education. L.A. Unified was ordered to provide classes and therapy to make up for lost time.

In the meantime, the prosecutor on his criminal case was telling another judge he "no longer [had] confidence" that Michael was at the scene of the murder, saying a witness was "trying to put the murder off on" Michael. The murder charge was dropped. Michael agreed to serve 12 years for a count of attempted murder and two counts of vandalism.

With time served, he could be released when he is 25.

The following month, Michael became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit to establish access rights for all special education students in county jail.

On the Sunday after Christmas, Yamileth went to visit her son.

She scanned his face through the thick glass in the visiting room. Michael smiled widely. He asked if she had gotten the Christmas card he'd sent. He asked about his brothers and mentioned how cold it had gotten in the cells.

Michael's court-ordered education hadn't yet started. He had been poring through novels, going through a book in two or three days and begging his mother for more. Trying to teach himself math had been challenging, he said. Once he is released, he wants to be able to provide for his 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, he said.

"It's hard by myself," he said. "I like to ask questions."

Earlier this year, Michael started attending classes in an attorney's room at the county jail. At the end of the semester, he mailed Yamileth his report card with a sprinkling of B's and C's. Even better was an A in reading, the first he'd ever received. He asked his mother to take good care of the report card. She joked that she would have it framed.

Michael was transferred this month to the California Institution for Men in Chino, where he will serve the remainder of his term.

Now, the possibility looms that Yamileth might have to fight yet again. A different set of laws applies to education in state prison, said Andrea Oxman, one of Michael's attorneys. It is unclear if Michael, now 20, will have access to special education.

Yamileth is undeterred. If it takes another round, so be it.

"I want my son to come out of there a better man than when he walked in," she said. "I know I have to work hard to accomplish this, and he's going to have to work hard."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0928-michael-20100928,0,4033365,print.story

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U.S. Army sergeant described as ringleader in slaying of Afghan civilians

In a hearing for Jeremy Morlock, one of five soldiers accused of murder, testimony focuses instead on Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs. Soldiers say he urged the attacks.

By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

September 28, 2010

Reporting from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

The first public hearing involving charges that five soldiers gunned down Afghan civilians for sport concluded Monday, with witnesses and lawyers describing widespread fear of the sergeant who has been described as the ringleader of the slayings.

That sergeant is Calvin Gibbs. Though the hearing was held to determine whether Spc. Jeremy Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, will face a court-martial on murder charges, the testimony and court documents focused attention on Gibbs.

Prosecutors say Morlock was the right-hand man of Gibbs, who they say directed his troops on how to handle the killings. Prosecutors said he and some of the soldiers kept fingers and other body parts as souvenirs and were photographed posing with Afghan corpses.

Army officials have prevented those photos from being distributed to civilian lawyers, fearing they could be more widely disseminated and inflame Afghan public opinion.

Murder charges have been filed against Morlock, Gibbs and three other soldiers. If convicted, they could face the death penalty. All have denied the charges.

The 2nd Stryker Brigade, known as the 5th Stryker Brigade at the time of the killings, was posted to a tumultuous stretch of southern Afghanistan when Gibbs came aboard in December 2009. In statements to investigators, soldiers said the new sergeant pushed them to attack civilians.

"Everybody in the unit was threatened, from the beginning of this to the end, that if they were not on board, if they were a snitch …they'd get what's coming to them," said Michael Waddington, Morlock's lawyer. "Everybody in the platoon, as you see, is implicated in the crimes…. Many of those people were just along for the ride."

Gibbs' lawyer has denied the allegations.

In January, according to testimony Monday, Morlock and another soldier watched a civilian walk toward them on the other side of a low-lying wall. Following directions from Gibbs, Morlock dropped a grenade over the wall, and the other soldier opened fire. The man was killed.

After the incident, another soldier in the unit, Spc. Adam Winfield, sent his family a frantic message for help via Facebook. In a later telephone conversation, he told them, "Someone is getting away with murder," his mother, Emma Winfield, said in a telephone interview. Winfield said he was fearful of Gibbs and had been threatened against speaking out.

Winfield's father, a former Marine, called the Army's internal investigations unit to report the killing. But he has said publicly that he was rebuffed and told that his son's best chance at surviving was to stay quiet until he returned to the U.S.

Weeks later, according to Morlock's statement to investigators, Gibbs gunned down a second Afghan civilian and tossed an AK-47 next to the corpse. He ordered Morlock and another soldier to fire as well to make it appear there had been a shootout.

"He said this was part of the plan to make this more concrete and more believable and to let Staff Sgt. Gibbs know who was on board," said Army Special Agent Shannon B. Richey, who interviewed Morlock about the incident.

In May, Gibbs' unit arrived at a village sympathetic to the Taliban. Gibbs tossed a grenade at one civilian and told Morlock and Winfield to fire at the man, according to statements from the two soldiers read in court. The Afghan died. Morlock told the lieutenant on the scene that the man had tried to throw a grenade at the Americans.

Days later, members of the platoon beat a soldier who they believed was reporting on them for widespread use of hashish, authorities said. Gibbs and Morlock allegedly waved severed fingers at the soldier to threaten him. Military police alerted the Army's criminal investigations unit.

Shortly after the beating, Morlock was to be flown to Germany for medical treatment for brain injuries, but Army investigators intercepted him at a base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Investigators testified that Morlock told them he wanted to talk but feared for his safety if Gibbs found out. Morlock eventually gave a lengthy statement and returned for follow-up interviews, investigators said.

Winfield's parents said it was outrageous that their son, the soldier who tried to blow the whistle, faced murder charges. "I can't comprehend how he was charged with this when he was the only one who tried to do anything," Emma Winfield said.

Seven other soldiers face hashish charges. Of the 18 military witnesses listed in Monday's hearing, 14 — including the lieutenant who was the platoon's commander — refused to testify, citing their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Waddington said his client, Morlock, initially requested a lawyer but was rebuffed — a suggestion denied by Army investigators. He also argued that Morlock's statements to Army investigators should be disregarded because he was on numerous prescription medications to treat brain injuries. Army Special Agent Anderson D. Wagner, testifying by phone from Afghanistan, said that Morlock appeared coherent during the interviews.

Waddington also contended that Morlock did not directly kill anyone, saying that in all three of the incidents the fatal act appeared to have been committed by someone else. "He did not cause the death of any of these individuals," Waddington told reporters outside court.

A decision by a military judge on whether to hold a court-martial for Morlock is not expected for weeks.

Wagner acknowledged that investigators had not examined the bodies of the civilians and could not say who fired the fatal shot in each case. "If this was the United States, it's a no-brainer, it's easy," Wagner said. But in Afghanistan, "to exhume a body would cause a lot of issues. Even if it's for a good purpose, like we're trying to determine who killed your son or husband, for religious reasons it could cause an uproar."

Only if top commanders decide the case merits the risk of unearthing the bodies, Wagner said, would they be recovered.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-soldier-crimes-20100928,0,2022552,print.story

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Thousands employed locally through federal jobs program could be out of work by week's end

Tens of thousands could be suddenly jobless Friday if the U.S. Senate does not extend a federal program that pays businesses, community groups and local governments to employ low-income people, officials said Monday.

In Los Angeles County, 6,000 to 7,000 could be unemployed by the end of the week, said Philip Browning, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services. One of them is Danny Mariscal,of Los Angeles, an eager 19-year-old in his first job stuffing day-bed cushions into covers and inspecting finished furniture at Modernica Furniture, a factory in downtown Los Angeles near the L.A. River.

“I've been eager to find out. Hopefully, I do,” said Mariscal. He said his family was proud of him for getting his first job.

Mariscal said he spent half a year looking for a job, and it was hard to find entry-level work. “You had to have experience. Here, they were willing to show me,” Mariscal said.

Jobs like Mariscal's are funded by $1 billion in federal money contained in the $787-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 championed by President Obama. But the funds for the subsidized employment program will expire Thursday, at the end of the fiscal year, unless the U.S. Senate acts to extend the program.

Federal officials arrived at Mariscal's workplace Monday to tour the facility and drum up support for extending the program, which has stalled in the Senate amid concerns about the rising deficit. The Obama administration is seeking a one-year extension of the program.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/09/thousands-employed-locally-through-federal-jobs-program-could-be-out-of-work-by-weeks-end.html#more

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Waiting for a death-penalty debate

Albert Greenwood Brown is slated to be executed this week. It's too bad we can't have a real discussion on capital punishment.

OPINION

September 28, 2010

Despite a last-minute delay by the governor, Albert Greenwood Brown is still slated to die this week. Few would mourn the convicted murderer-rapist's passing, but it would nonetheless be a sad day for California.

Brown, 56, is poised to be the first inmate killed in the state's new death chamber in San Quentin, built after U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ordered a stay on executions in California in 2006 because its three-drug lethal-injection method appeared to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Brown's attorneys say Fogel's decision last week not to block their client's execution was rushed, and that even though Fogel is giving Brown the option of a single-drug method that is considered more humane, the judge still hasn't examined the new death chamber or properly studied new training procedures for the state's executioners.

They may have a point, but that's not why we're disappointed. We had hoped that Fogel's stay would start a dialogue in California about the death penalty, which is objectionable for a host of reasons, and not just because the three-drug death cocktail may not ease the pain of the condemned. We'd hoped Californians would be shaken by the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 following a conviction based on shoddy forensics evidence, or of the 17 death-row inmates in other states who were exonerated by DNA testing. We'd hoped they would notice that capital punishment has no deterrent effect on violent crime, or that the cost of carrying it out is helping to bankrupt the state, or that most developed nations have abandoned it because of its essential inhumanity.

They didn't. Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a temporary reprieve that will put off the execution until Thursday at the earliest, he's a supporter of capital punishment. So are both the Democratic and Republican candidates to replace him. That's the politically popular choice; a recent Field poll showed that 70% of Californians favor the death penalty. If the gruesome work resumes, we will have only ourselves to blame.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-death-20100928,0,3558673,print.story

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Capital punishment politics

Why the rush to execute Albert Brown? Perhaps because being tough on crime is a vote-getter.

By Elisabeth Semel

September 28, 2010

Californians tend to think that capital punishment in the South — especially in Texas, where the overwhelming majority of executions take place — is driven by politics. But this week's scramble to carry out an execution in California for the first time in almost five years is a reminder that electoral politics is also an engine driving our state's capital punishment system.

Executions have been on hold in California since 2006 because of three legal challenges to the manner by which the state takes a life. The most well known of the cases is the one in which U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel issued a preliminary ruling in December 2006 finding that if the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not revise its execution method, he would be compelled to declare California's procedures in violation of the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.

In the second challenge, in state court, the corrections department was successfully sued for devising its lethal-injection protocol in secret, which is impermissible under the state's Administrative Procedures Act. A separate federal court challenge alleges that use of a paralytic chemical — the second in the three-drug procedure — acts as a "chemical curtain" that prevents the media and the public from observing whether the inmate is experiencing excruciating pain during the execution.

In each of the three lawsuits, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's office, which represents the corrections department, has argued that it is permitted to adopt its procedures behind closed doors — that is, to operate free from judicial or public oversight. Absent these legal challenges, however, the public would not have learned, as Fogel found, that the protocol in practice was unreliable and that there may have been problems with as many as seven of the 11 lethal-injection executions carried out under the protocol that was in place until now.

In July, the state's administrative agency approved the correction's department's new lethal-injection procedures. In August, with the approval of the state attorney general's office, the execution of Albert Greenwood Brown, who was convicted of murder and rape, was scheduled for Sept. 29. This action was taken despite the fact that none of the cases challenging California's lethal-injection procedures has been resolved.

On Friday, Fogel declined to include Brown in the case before him, but he expressed surprise at the state's insistence on speed: "The court has always understood, apparently incorrectly, that executions would not resume until it had an opportunity to review the new lethal-injection protocol."

On Monday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger intervened to grant a reprieve until Sept. 30.

However, the politics of the situation are symbolized by the fact that the execution was scheduled at all. Jerry Brown's office insists that the attorney general, who is running for governor, had nothing to do with the exact timing of the Sept. 29 execution date. But it strains credulity to argue that any impetus other than election season politics accounts for this rush to execute.

We have seen this before. In California campaigns, candidates often work hard to establish their law-and-order bona fides, amplifying the volume on their endorsement of the death penalty. During the 1990 gubernatorial race between Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein, both candidates ran ads touting their support for the death penalty. This strategy has also been a hallmark of Dan Lungren's political career, as attorney general and now in Congress.

Candidates who support environmental and consumer protection, a woman's right to choose and public education frequently move to the right on criminal justice issues in order to get elected because it is the least politically risky shift. Brown — a onetime opponent of the death penalty who is facing Meg Whitman, an unwavering capital punishment advocate — is now positioned to be the man who got executions on track after a hiatus of nearly five years.

Since the last execution in California, there has been no public groundswell to get the death chamber back in business. Californians have been no less safe than they were between 1992 and 2006, when 13 men were executed. In fact, violent crimes — homicides in particular — have steadily declined during this period.

Both gubernatorial candidates insist that they can return California to solvency. But even as day-care centers are closing, teachers are being laid off and services for the poor and disabled are being curtailed, and the state parks are having rouble paying for toilet paper, neither Brown nor Whitman has publicly raised questions about whether the state should continue to shoulder the huge costs of capital punishment. According to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, the death penalty system costs the state $137 million each year, and if the system were brought up to the level recommended by the commission, it would require an additional $95 million annually to repair a system that California Chief Justice Ronald M. George called "dysfunctional." A new death row, needed to deal with such issues as overcrowding, will cost an estimated $400 million.

Neither candidate has been willing to ask whether Californians want to spend the financial or moral capital it will take to execute the 700 men and women who have been sentenced to death.

In 2008, in his concurring opinion in Baze vs. Rees, which upheld Kentucky's lethal injection procedures, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his conclusion that capital punishment violates the Constitution. He called on the nation to begin a sober, rational discussion about the continued imposition of the death penalty.

Jerry Brown had the opportunity to open this dialogue in California by allowing the three legal challenges to go forward before an execution date was set. The governor stepped in to postpone Albert Brown's execution. But the politics of the situation remain unchanged.

Elisabeth Semel is a clinical professor of law at UC Berkeley's school of law, where she directs the Death Penalty Clinic.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-semel-execution-20100928,0,7349382,print.story

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It's time to fight back against death threats by Islamic extremists

A federal law is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

OPINION

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff

September 27, 2010

Earlier this year, after Comedy Central altered an episode of "South Park" that had prompted threats because of the way it depicted Islam's prophet Muhammad, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proposed an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." The idea was, as she put it, to stand up for the 1st Amendment and "water down the pool of targets" for extremists.

The proposal got Norris targeted for assassination by radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar Awlaki, who has been linked to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight and also to several of the 9/11 hijackers. This month, after warnings from the FBI, Norris went into hiding. The Seattle Weekly said that Norris was "moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity."

It's time for free-speech advocates to take a page from the abortion rights movement's playbook. In the 1990s, abortion providers faced the same sort of intimidation tactics and did not succumb. Instead, they lobbied for a federal law making it a crime to threaten people exercising reproductive rights and permitting victims to sue for damages. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE, passed in 1994 by solid bipartisan margins. A similar act is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights.

A federal law would do two things. First, it would deter violent tactics, by focusing national attention on the problem and invoking the formidable enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Second, its civil damages provision would empower victims of intimidation to act as private attorneys general to defend their rights.

Such an act is overdue. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

In 2004, Theo van Gogh was butchered on an Amsterdam street in broad daylight for his film criticizing Islam's treatment of women. By 2006, it was reported that "dozens of people" across Europe were "in hiding or under police protection because of threats from Muslim extremists."

Some targets, including the coauthor of this Op-Ed, fled to the United States, where it seemed safer -- and so it is, for now. However, the stark truth is the United States was never immune and the situation is deteriorating.

In 1989, two American bookstores carrying Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" were firebombed. Spooked major chains took it off display. And there have been many more threats that received less publicity. Few have heard, for example, about Oklahoma atheist Sabri Husibi, who received death threats after writing a 2009 article critical of his former faith. His aged mother in Syria was warned she would never see him again. "Clearly shaken," he requested the paper that published his article clarify that he is critical of all faiths.

These kinds of threats have had a formidable chilling effect. Mindful of the retaliation others faced, Yale University Press, the Met, the director of the disaster epic "2012" and countless others have decided to preemptively censor themselves.

The kind of legislation we propose is essential if we are to win the war of ideas against extremists, who use threats to drive the moderate message out of public discourse.

Existing state laws prohibiting intimidation are inadequate. On the criminal side, the heightened standard of proof deters prosecutors from investing scarce resources. Explicit grounds for a civil action do not always exist, and damages can be difficult to quantify. By contrast, the FACE Act, which provides the model for the proposed legislation, lets victims opt for preset damages.

The "South Park" incident neatly illustrates the benefits. On April 15, following the first of a two-part episode mocking Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, RevolutionMuslim.com announced that "[w]e have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh." The "warning" included the names, photos and work address of "South Park's" creators, a graphic image of Van Gogh's mutilated body and pictures of other targets of Muslim extremists. Overlaying this was audio of Awlaki preaching about assassinating anyone who defamed the prophet. Panicked, Comedy Central heavily censored the episode.

This rather obvious threat could not be prosecuted. New York Police Department officials explained it did not rise to a crime. Were the FACE Act applicable here, a civil suit would have been available, and precedent suggests it would have been successful.

In 2002, on very similar facts, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a civil award to abortion doctors who sued using the FACE Act. A fringe antiabortion group, ACLA, had in various public venues displayed "Wanted"-style posters bearing the names, photos and addresses of doctors who performed abortions. Their names were also posted on the Internet alongside a list of wounded and murdered doctors whose names were struck through. The 9th Circuit held that ACLA's activities constituted true threats unprotected by the 1st Amendment.

If we leave our artists, activists and thinkers alone to weather the assault, they will succumb and we will all suffer the consequences.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America." Daniel Huff is director of the Middle East Forum's Legal Project.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ali-threats-20100927,0,3058572,print.story

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Texas messes with Islam

The state Board of Education's bid to limit references to Islam in school textbooks is a disservice to a major religion of the world and to Texas students.

OPINION

September 28, 2010

From the state that brought you the notion that Thomas Jefferson wasn't an important Founding Father, and that the interning of 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II had nothing to do with racism, comes another attempt to insert personal prejudice into public school textbooks. This time, the Texas Board of Education is trying to limit references to Islam.

Textbooks nationwide have been twisted, dumbed down and flattened into such boring tomes that it's no wonder most students can't abide them. The public education establishment's concerns about political correctness have resulted in books written more to avoid hurting feelings than to inform and challenge. California is one of the worst offenders, with its requirements that the elderly, disabled and minority groups be shown in a positive light and be given proportional representation.

But that's not as troubling as the latest doings in Texas, whose school board on Friday decided that references to Islam in the state's textbooks must be reduced. It's bad enough that the board — which has made a point of opening meetings with Christian prayers and voicing its belief that government should be run according to Christian beliefs — tampered with history earlier this year by ordering publishers to downplay the role of Jefferson because he coined the phrase "separation of church and state."

No one could accuse the school board of following in Jefferson's footsteps. It's particularly odious to see a government agency, especially one responsible for educating children, single out a religion and seek to diminish its status in world history. The new resolution comes from an apparent misreading of a textbook, one section of which contains more references to Islam than to Christianity. But there are other sections in the book that mention Christianity extensively. Given the board's history of setting a "Christian" agenda, its attack on a single religion could be challenged in court.

Whether the Texas school board likes it or not, the United States' interaction with Islam has broadened and deepened in recent years. Today's students will need to understand and deal with these changes as they mature and enter the workforce and civic life. The school board has done a disservice to a major world religion and its followers — and to Texas' students.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-texas-20100928,0,7996748,print.story

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From the New York Times

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C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks on Taliban in Pakistan

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan in recent weeks, American officials said. The strikes are part of an effort by military and intelligence operatives to try to cripple the Taliban in a stronghold being used to plan attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month. This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration's comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December. American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan.

The strikes also reflect mounting frustration both in Afghanistan and the United States that Pakistan's government has not been aggressive enough in dislodging militants from their bases in the country's western mountains. In particular, the officials said, the Americans believe the Pakistanis are unlikely to launch military operations inside North Waziristan, a haven for Taliban and Qaeda operatives that has long been used as a base for attacks against troops in Afghanistan.

Beyond the C.I.A. drone strikes, the war in the region is escalating in other ways. In recent days, American military helicopters have launched three airstrikes into Pakistan that military officials estimate killed more than 50 people suspected of being members of the militant group known as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for a spate of deadly attacks against American troops.

Such air raids by the military remain rare, and officials in Kabul said Monday that the helicopters entered Pakistani airspace on only one of the three raids, and acted in self-defense after militants fired rockets at an allied base just across the border in Afghanistan. At the same time, the strikes point to a new willingness by military officials to expand the boundaries of the campaign against the Taliban and Haqqani network — and to an acute concern in military and intelligence circles about the limited time to attack Taliban strongholds while American “surge” forces are in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have angrily criticized the helicopter attacks, saying that NATO 's mandate in Afghanistan does not extend across the border in Pakistan.

As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus , the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.

“Petraeus wants to turn up the heat on the safe havens,” said one senior administration official, explaining the sharp increase in drone strikes. “He has pointed out to the Pakistanis that they could do more.”

Special Operations commanders have also been updating plans for cross-border raids, which would require approval from President Obama . For now, officials said, it remains unlikely that the United States would make good on such threats to send American troops over the border, given the potential blowback inside Pakistan, an ally.

But that could change, they said, if Pakistan-based militants were successful in carrying out a terrorist attack on American soil. American and European intelligence officials in recent days have spoken publicly about growing evidence that militants may be planning a large-scale attack in Europe, and have bolstered security at a number of European airports and railway stations.

“We are all seeing increased activity by a more diverse set of groups and a more diverse set of threats,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano before a Senate panel last week.

The senior administration official said the strikes were intended not only to attack Taliban and Haqqani fighters, but also to disrupt any plots directed from or supported by extremists in Pakistan's tribal areas that were aimed at targets in Europe. “The goal is to suppress or disrupt that activity,” the official said.

The 20 C.I.A. drone attacks in September represent the most intense bombardment by the spy agency since January, when the C.I.A. carried out 11 strikes after a suicide bomber killed seven agency operatives at a remote base in eastern Afghanistan.

According to one Pakistani intelligence official, the recent drone attacks have not killed any senior Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Many senior operatives have already fled North Waziristan, he said, to escape the C.I.A. drone campaign.

Over all the spy agency has carried out 74 drone attacks this year, according to the Web site The Long War Journal , which tracks the strikes. A vast majority of the attacks — which usually involve several drones firing multiple missiles or bombs — have taken place in North Waziristan.

The Obama administration has enthusiastically embraced the C.I.A.'s drone program, an ambitious and historically unusual war campaign by American spies. According to The Long War Journal, the spy agency in 2009 and 2010 has launched nearly four times as many attacks as it did during the final year of the Bush administration.

One American official said that the recent strikes had been aimed at several groups, including the Haqqani network, Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The United States, he said, hopes to “keep the pressure on as long as we can.”

But the C.I.A.'s campaign has also raised concerns that the drone strikes are fueling anger in the Muslim world. The man who attempted to detonate a truck filled with explosives in Times Square told a judge that the C.I.A. drone campaign was one of the factors that led him to attack the United States.

In a meeting with reporters on Monday, General Petraeus indicated that it was new intelligence gathering technology that helped NATO forces locate the militants killed by the helicopter raids against militants in Pakistan.

In particular, he said, the military has expanded its fleet of reconnaissance blimps that can hover over hide-outs thought to belong to the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

The intelligence technology, General Petraeus said, has also enabled the expanded campaign of raids by Special Operations commandos against Taliban operatives in those areas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/world/asia/28drones.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Norway Says Three Planned Attack Over Cartoons

PARIS — The Norwegian police said Tuesday that three suspected militants arrested in July had been planning an attack on a Danish newspaper whose publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 ignited fury in much of the Muslim world the following year.

The claimed link to the cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper underscored the enduring impact of the 12 drawings as a focal point of militant action. Earlier this month, Danish police said a Chechen boxer had been planning to send a letter bomb to the same newspaper when the explosives went off accidentally at a hotel in Copenhagen.

While the two cases were not believed to be directly linked, they “illustrate that there is a priority among militant Islamists to carry out acts of terror against Denmark and symbols connected” to the drawings, The Associated Press quoted Jakob Scharf, the head of Denmark police intelligence service, as saying.

On July 8, Norwegian police said they had arrested three men suspected of links to Al Qaeda who had been planning an attack, but they did not make clear what the target was

In Oslo, Siv Alsen, a spokeswoman for the security service of the Norwegian police, said the plan to attack a Danish newspaper had emerged from questioning of one of the suspects, a 37-year-old Iraqi Kurd identified as Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak Bujak. The information he provided showed that the three men had been planning an attack against Jyllands-Posten, Ms. Alsen said in a telephone interview.

The three suspects, one an Iraqi Kurd, one a Uighur from China who had become a Norwegian citizen and one from Uzbekistan, had all arrived in Norway seeking asylum between 1999 and 2002 and had permanent residency rights, she said. Ms. Alsen declined to give details of the nature of the plot. She said investigators had not established a link with Al Qaeda. Details of the inquiry so far had emerged from a leak to a Norwegian newspaper, she said.

After the cartoons were published in late 2005, protests and violence spread into 2006 in many parts of the Muslim from Afghanistan and Indonesia, through the Middle East to Nigeria. The conflict sharpened as other European newspapers, including some in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Hungary, reprinted the cartoons.

The drawings included one of which depicted the prophet wearing a turban with a ticking bomb nestled in it. Images of Muhammad are regarded as blasphemous by many Muslims.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/europe/29norway.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Chechnya Coerces Women on Dress, Activists Say

MOSCOW — Women in Chechnya are under pressure to adopt Islamic dress, according to human rights activists and an Islamic fundamentalist video circulating on the Internet in the latest example of deteriorating women's rights under Ramzan A. Kadyrov , the president of the restive southern Russian republic.

Activists in Chechnya, where Russia has waged two wars against separatists in the past 16 years, said intimidation reached a peak during the fasting month of Ramadan . There was also a crackdown on violations of Islamic law such as the sale of food before sundown and any sale of alcohol, they said.

The activists who spoke from Chechnya insisted on anonymity because they said they feared reprisals.

Threats tapered off, they said, as Ramadan ended in mid-September. Men in Islamic clothes had been approaching women whom they deemed unsuitably dressed to pull them by the arm, an offense according to Chechen custom.

A woman activist said that incidents she recorded in August included a woman being taken away by men in a jeep for wearing a skirt they regarded as see-through and no head scarf in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Other men handed out leaflets to women advising them how to dress, she said.

According to Chechen tradition, women should not wear sleeveless clothes; they usually wear a strip of headscarf more like a hairband than a hijab . Until recently, it was considered the prerogative of male family members to decide their style of dress, but Islamic activists, with support from Mr. Kadyrov, are calling for much fuller cover.

The run-up to Chechen Women's Day, a holiday decreed by Mr. Kadyrov to honor 46 Chechen women who drowned rather than succumb to Russian soldiers in 19th century wars, featured fawning praise in the Chechen media of women as wives and mothers and calls to observe Islamic morals.

Chechen television reported on September 16 about a march in Grozny of female students of an Islamic university in Islamic dress. The event, organized by a club called “Ramzan” and a government agency responsible for “spiritual and moral education,” was dubbed “Beauty of the Chechen Woman.”

“Every person must strive to beauty, and a young woman who puts on a hijab looks beautiful, as befits the dictates of the Almighty,” Sado Meserbiyev, the chairman of “Ramzan,” said.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in August that women's rights were being violated by efforts to impose an Islamic dress code. It said women without headscarves or in immodest dress had been attacked with paintball guns in Grozny.

Last week, Russia's human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, asked the federal prosecutor general's office to investigate the paintball incidents.

Tanya Lokshina, a researcher in Human Rights Watch's Moscow office who travels regularly to Chechnya, said the situation of women had deteriorated under Mr. Kadyrov, 33, who succeeded his father, Akhmad Kadyrov , a former rebel leader and mufti who became a fervent Kremlin supporter before he was killed by an assassin's bomb in 2004.

“Instructions were given that girls can't go to school without scarves, or young women to university, and that it's impossible to work without a scarf,” Ms. Lokshina said. “Pressure grew, through television programs and declarations, to control the morals of women.”

Ms. Lokshina recalled that Natalya Estemirova , a Chechen human rights campaigner who was murdered last year, was subjected to a cascade of expletives when summoned by Mr. Kadyrov in March 2008. He was infuriated that Ms. Estemirova had said women were being forced to wear headscarves, a comment she made in an interview with REN-TV, a Russian television station,

In 2007, Mr. Kadyrov said that women employed by the government must cover their heads at work.

“In this case we're talking about a real violation of women's right to privacy, or freedom of conscience,” Ms. Lokshina said of the pressure to adhere to a dress code.

Ms. Lokshina forwarded a scanned brochure which she said was sent to her from Chechnya, showing how Islamists would like women to dress: in long loose coats and full head scarf.

The rule of the Kadyrovs has brought a tenuous peace to Chechnya. Grozny has been rebuilt and Mr. Kadyrov's Web site praises Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin for having “given us everything.”

Yet attacks by insurgents who say they are true representatives of Islam continue, even as Mr. Kadyrov introduces measures that he says are meant to preserve peace and the purity of Islam.

“The Kremlin closes its eyes on everything that Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov does, giving him total carte blanche on actions that are against the law,” Ms. Lokshina said.

Footage on the Internet shows women in dresses with short sleeves and no headscarves being sprayed with paint from passing cars. Mr. Kadyrov told Chechen television in July that he approved of such action.

“Even if it was done with my permission, I wouldn't be ashamed,” he said. “It turns out that the girls who were sprayed with paint had been warned several times previously. After such an incident, a girl should just disappear from the face of the earth, lock herself in the house and not go out because she behaved so inappropriately that such a thing happened to her.”

Mr. Kadyrov made similar comments after seven women were found shot and killed in Grozny in 2008. No official explanation of the deaths was ever offered, but Chechens speculated at the time that the women might have been victims of “honor killings” after they were accused of immoral behavior.

Dik Altemirov, a 76-year-old Chechen human rights activist and opponent of Islamic fundamentalism, said in a telephone interview that attacks on women could lead to blood feuds.

“I can authoritatively say that there is a very high price to pay here for touching a woman,” he said. “I don't think that those who suffered from these excesses will forgive them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/world/europe/28iht-chechnya.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Tons of Medications Collected

Federal drug enforcement officials said northern New Englanders dropped off nearly six tons of unused and out-of-date prescription drugs to collection sites to be destroyed. In Maine, officials said that 7,820 pounds of drugs were collected at more than 100 sites across the state over the weekend as part of a national effort. New Hampshire's total was 2,479 pounds and Vermont's was 1,127 pounds, for a total of 5.7 tons. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28brfs-002.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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How to Spot a Terrorist

Newark

A YOUNG man walks into a Home Depot and buys a large quantity of acetone. Later, a young man walks into a beauty supply store and buys hydrogen peroxide. Still later, a young man is observed parked outside a nondescript federal building in a rented van, taking photographs.

No crime has been committed. But should any of these activities (acetone and hydrogen peroxide can be components for explosives) be reported to and evaluated by law enforcement officials? If they are reported, the government may infringe on privacy and civil liberties. If they are not, we might not know until it's too late whether it was the same young man in each instance. We might miss the next Timothy McVeigh.

This dilemma was at the heart of hearings before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, in which several federal officials warned that “homegrown terrorists” represent the nation's greatest emerging threat.

According to the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, Al Qaeda “has looked to recruit Americans or Westerners who are able to remain undetected by heightened security measures.” This reality has led Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, to conclude that “homeland security begins with hometown security.” And hometown security begins with locally based observations of “suspicious” activity. So, can we encourage such observation without also encouraging a disregard for privacy and constitutional rights?

We may get our answer from a project now being undertaken by the Justice Department called the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative . Federal, state and local law enforcement officials have set up “fusion centers” for the program in about a dozen cities, including Boston, Chicago and Houston, where reports of suspicious activities made by citizens and the local police are collected and analyzed for disturbing patterns.

Suspicious Activity Reporting begins at the troubling intersection where law enforcement meets intelligence. Its premise is that if potential attacks are to be prevented, and not merely responded to, law enforcement must focus on precursor conduct — surveillance or “casing” of bridges or train stations, for instance — that may not itself be criminal, but may signal a coming attack.

One need only look to the events of the past year — the shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.; the attempted bombing of a jetliner on Christmas Day; the Times Square bombing attempt ; the New York subway plot — to see the point. Each of these attacks and attempted attacks was preceded by “precursor conduct,” legally protected actions like chatting on the Internet or purchasing legal chemicals or applying for a visa, that combined with other information might have tipped off law enforcement agents to the intended act of terrorism.

The Suspicious Activity Reporting program recognizes both the necessity for a focus on precursor conduct and the potential for abuse. It strikes a balance by establishing a uniform process for gathering and sharing information. It seeks to avoid racial profiling and other law enforcement excesses by requiring that the reports be based on the evidence of suspicious conduct, not on what the person looks like or where he comes from.

The government consulted with civil liberties groups as it devised the initiative, and they secured changes in the program to assure that the threshold for criminal conduct would not be lowered and that individual privacy would not be violated by the willy-nilly entry of innuendo into a government record. As Michael German, the security policy counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. special agent, put it last year, “The revised guidelines for suspicious activity reporting establish that a reasonable connection to terrorism or other criminal activity is required before law enforcement may collect Americans' personal information and share it.”

Nonetheless, the A.C.L.U. is now taking issue with the program, saying that it “increases the probability that innocent people will be stopped by police and have their personal information collected.” Mr. German worries that an effort like this “moves the police officer away from his core function, to enforce the law, into being an intelligence officer gathering information about people.”

At bottom, whether the civil liberties risks posed by the reporting program are justified turns on whether the administration's claims about the evolving threat are true. The attacks of the last year suggest that they are. As for the idea that it will bring police departments into new territory, surely police officers have always been on the lookout for precursor conduct — burglars casing a home or bank, for instance. The difference here is one of degree.

Paradoxically, perhaps the biggest hurdle the initiative faces is not civil liberties worries but the age-old barrier between federal law enforcement and its state and local counterparts. The F.B.I. has raised concerns about sharing intelligence with state law enforcement because some states' open public records laws might result in the bureau having to make public some of its data. And, in a time of shrinking budgets, turf battles between the fusion centers and federal law enforcement are a certainty.

Civil liberties and bureaucratic concerns are legitimate. But this initiative represents the administration's first thoughtful steps in fulfilling President Obama's commitment to defining a lasting rule of law for this brave new world. We must make it work.

John Farmer Jr., a former senior counsel for the 9/11 commission, is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law-Newark and the author of “The Ground Truth.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28farmer.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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Book tells ex-cocaine dealer's incredible story

NEW BOOK | Went undercover to try to catch a serial killer

September 28, 2010

BY KIM JANSSEN

When Jimmy Keene was a teenager, he wanted to play in the NFL. If he didn't make it, he told his dad, he'd settle for Hollywood.

Neither happened. But with a cocaine empire stretching from his Kankakee home to the South Side of Chicago, he was soon making too much money to care. Then he was locked up, and it seemed too late.

Now, at age 46, he's almost there. A book telling his life story comes out today, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter is adapting it.

It wasn't the cliched lifestyle of a 1980s cocaine kingpin that attracted Paramount to secure the rights -- though Keene had that life, complete with the mansion, the Corvettes, the women and the circle of rich friends.

It was the incredible deal federal prosecutors offered him that gave him a shot at redemption, and has stars including Brad Pitt lining up to play him on screen.

Let us transfer you to the highest security psychiatric hospital in the nation, they told him. Befriend a serial killer, get him to confess and tell us where he buried the bodies. Succeed and we'll release you. Fail and you might die. Nobody -- not even prison staff -- will know of your mission.

"Even while it was happening, it felt like a movie," he told his brother when it was all finally over.

"I guess I did get in the back door in the end," Keene said, laughing, during a recent interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. Now living in Oak Brook, he's been plotting to sell his story for a decade and is jittery how he'll look.

"I wish there was another word for drug dealer," he laments. "It sounds so harsh."

Keene still has the footballer's build that helped him lead Eastridge High School to a state championship game as a running back. He would rather focus on a ''fallen hero,'' and not what the blurb on his book, In With The Devil, calls "a few costly mistakes."

The son of "the toughest, most feared cop in town," he relied on his sporting ability to fit in with a wealthy crowd, he said. Dealing drugs kept him popular.

By the time he was 20, he was buying from a Mexican cartel, supplying Cicero mobsters and raking in more than $1 million a year, according to Hillel Levin, who co-wrote Keene's book. His customers included John Cappas, the brash Southwest Side dealer who infuriated the FBI by taking a leggy female reporter and her camera crew out on Lake Michigan in his speedboat before turning himself in.

But as fast as Keene made money, the legitimate businesses he helped his father set up lost it. By the time federal agents busted through his front door in 1996, he'd been dealing for 15 years.

The 10-year sentence hit Keene hard. Worse was the effect on his father, who suffered a stroke.

Keene's best hope once he got out was the job at a mob restaurant that he'd been offered by his cellmate at Milan Correctional Center, outfit leader Frank Calabrese Sr.

Then, 10 months in, he met with the prosector who'd convicted him, Lawrence Beaumont.

"He threw this manila folder on the table," Keene said. "I flipped it open and all of a sudden there's a picture of a dead girl, and then another." The pictures of the bodies were followed by a series of yearbook photos of smiling girls.

"All through my trial, they never got me to crack, and I thought, now they're gonna say they can tie me to a murder conspiracy," Keene said. "I thought it was a trick to get me to give up the mafia people, the cartel people, possibly my dad."

Beaumont instead explained that another defendant he'd prosecuted, a Civil War buff called Larry Hall, had been convicted of killing one of the girls, Jessica Roach, but was suspected of killing as many as 20 other women. Hall was being held at the maximum security psychiatric prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., but was appealing and could walk free, Beaumont said. If Keene could win new evidence against Hall, Beaumont would ask a judge to release Keene.

"I wasn't sure I could do it," Keene said. "I'm not a serial killer hunter. If someone said to you, go to a prison undercover where anyone could kill you at any moment, pretend to be someone else and get inside this serial killer's head, what would you think?"

But Beaumont told Keene he "had social skills that could take me from the street to the board room," Keene said.

He spent months secretly studying Hall's file at night while he waited to be transferred, reading by the "itty-bitty bit of light that came through the bars."

To avoid suspicion, Keene's FBI handlers urged him to avoid Hall for six months. But an hour after arriving in Springfield, he found himself facing Hall in the food hall and decided to "wing it."

Resisting the temptation to beat a confession out of Hall, he blurted, "I'm new around here, do you know where the library is?" Keene said. "He told me and I said, 'Thanks I appreciate that from a cool guy like you,' and he bugged his eyes out like Charlie Manson and said, 'You think I'm cool?' "

By luck or instinct, Keene stumbled on a winning approach. Hall, a misfit who'd grown up in a cemetery, wore odd muttonchop sideburns and had no luck with women, was unpopular even in prison. "I was a better looking, cooler version of his big brother," Keene said.

Soon there was another problem. New York mob boss Vincente ''The Chin'' Gigante warned Keene to stop hanging around Hall and his circle of 'Baby Killer' buddies.

"I had to have a different face for Larry, for the guards, for the Mafia, for the FBI and my family," he said.

And Hall proved tough to crack. For months he claimed he'd been convicted of selling guns, not murder. Telling Hall his mother read about the Jessica Roach case in the paper got Keene past that block. Sticking up for Hall in fights and sympathizing with his misogyny cemented the bond.

Four months after Keene arrived in Springfield, Hall finally confessed how he found Roach at the side of a road, knocked her out with a rag soaked in starter fluid, then "blacked out" and raped her in the back of his van, before strangling her with a belt.

A couple of days later, Hall explained how he killed a second girl, Tricia Reitler, after she rejected his sexual advances. Again he claimed he'd blacked out while he raped and killed her.

"He told me he would be hovering over the top of them watching himself do it and then he'd wake up next to them and they'd be dead," Keene said. "When you're in there with him alone and he starts going into deep bizarre details, there's no question -- he's a killer."

The final breakthrough came when Keene snuck into the prison woodshop and found Hall.

"He had this map of Illinois and Indiana laid out with little red dots on it and 10 or 12 of these little wooden statues of falcons that he'd made exactly alike," Keene said. "As soon as he saw me he freaked out and covered up the map. I picked up one of the falcons but he freaked out, saying 'Give me it back!' He was holding it like a little baby and he said, 'They watch out for the dead Jim, do you want one?' "

"Immediately I realized that's where all the dead bodies are."

That night, convinced he at last had enough evidence, Keene marched into Hall's cell and told him, "I know everything you've done and I think you're one f---ed up piece of s---."

It was a critical error.

Keene was woken the next morning by 10 guards and Hall's furious psychiatrist, who threw him in solitary confinement.

"After a week I started worrying I'd be trapped forever," Keene said. "I was all scraggly looking and I was shouting, 'Listen to me, you're going to think I'm crazy -- but I'm working with the FBI!' "

Keene's psychiatrist -- the only person in prison who knew his true mission -- had gone on vacation. By the time he returned, Keene had been in the hole more than a month.

Keene bounced around the system a few more weeks and passed a lie detector test before he was finally released Feb. 24, 1999.

Days later, Hall's appeal was rejected. Keene would not have to testify, after all.

For prosecutors -- and Keene -- it was a frustrating end. Though Hall will die behind bars, the delay getting Keene out of solitary confinement gave Hall time to get rid of the map and the falcons, which have not been recovered. Tricia Reitler's body has not been found and the murders in at least eight other states Hall is suspected of remained unsolved.

"Jimmy was an intelligent kid," Beaumont -- now a defense attorney -- remembers. "He probably took it a little too far in the end for it all to work out."

The temptation to add a happier ending to the Hollywood version of Keene's story will likely be intense. All Keene will say is that a love interest has been added.

His early release allowed him to spend several years with his father, who died of a heart attack in 2004.

He's now in the property business, living on the income from Paramount, working on other movie deals and is mostly unrepentant about his time dealing drugs, if not the shame he brought on his family.

"I'm the same character I always was, but my direction in life has completely changed," he says. "Now it's time to tell my story."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2752080,CST-NWS-keene28.article

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From the White House

Keep Putting Them on the Job!

It's hard to get more clear-cut about the right thing to do for the economy than the opening of this story  from the New York Times this weekend:

Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs within weeks unless Congress extends one of the more effective job-creating programs in the $787 billion stimulus act: a $1 billion New Deal-style program that directly paid the salaries of unemployed people so they could get jobs in government, at nonprofit organizations and at many small businesses.

In rural Perry County, Tenn., the program helped pay for roughly 400 new jobs in the public and private sectors. But in a county of 7,600 people, those jobs had a big impact: they reduced Perry County's unemployment rate to less than 14 percent this August, from the Depression-like levels of more than 25 percent that it hit last year after its biggest employer, an auto parts factory, moved to Mexico.

If the stimulus program ends on schedule next week, Perry County officials said, an estimated 300 people there will lose their jobs — the equivalent of another factory closing.

The American economy has been growing now for the past four quarters, and private-sector employers have added jobs every month this year.  But the economic hole left by the Great Recession remains very deep, and creating jobs remains the administration's top priority.

With that in mind, when one of our programs is effectively and efficiently creating hundreds of thousands of jobs for workers who need them, the last thing we should do is shut the program down.

But unless Congress acts quickly, that's exactly what's going to happen to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Subsidized Jobs program.  This program is a proven success – more than 30 states are already using the program to put folks back on the job, and if we let it end prematurely, this highly effective job creation infrastructure that's been created at the state level will go to waste.

Sadly, Republicans in Congress are playing politics with the future of this program at precisely the time we can least afford to shut it down.

We've been talking about what a great program this is  for months now, because it's been extremely effective.  It lets states use Recovery Act dollars to help employers pay for the cost of hiring unemployed workers, and by lowering hiring costs, it encourages employers to hire more workers and create more jobs.  And because many of these workers are being hired at private-sector businesses, the program is not only creating jobs, but also helping American businesses expand and grow.

Unfortunately, the program is scheduled to expire just a few days from now, at the end of September, even though the workers who have been placed through the program still badly need these jobs.  That's why we've been fighting so hard to get this program extended.

The good news is that the program is getting more and more well-deserved attention, like the New York Times article  above telling the story of some of the workers and communities that depend on this program and the jobs it's providing.  And outside of Washington, the program has gotten strong bipartisan support from figures like Haley Barbour, Mississippi's Republican governor.

But unfortunately, here in the nation's capital, politics are still triumphing over common sense as Republicans in Congress block action to extend this highly successful job creation program.

Look, I understand there are differences of opinion about the best way to create jobs in this country, but there's a time and a place for those disagreements.  We should all be able to agree not to shut down programs that are successfully putting workers on the job at private-sector businesses across the country.

So I hope Republicans in Congress will rise above the politics and work with us to extend this program.  We only have a few days left to act.  Let's keep helping businesses put these folks back on the job.

Jared Bernstein is Chief Economic Advisor to the Vice President

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/27/keep-putting-them-job

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Open for Questions: Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

Tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. EDT, the White House Office of Urban Affairs is hosting a live chat on the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative to support the transformation of distressed neighborhoods into neighborhoods of opportunity.

Last week, the Department of Education announced a total of $10 million in awards to Promise Neighborhoods, a cornerstone of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. Tomorrow, join representatives from across agencies for a dialogue on the Promise Neighborhoods Program and the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative.

Join the conversation with Larkin Tackett, Department of Education; Luke Tate, Department of Housing and Urban Development; Thomas Abt, Department of Justice; and Richard Frank, Department of Health and Human Services; moderated by Derek Douglas, White House Domestic Policy Council. 

• Submit your questions in advance over at Next American City  by 10:00 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 28
  
  
• Watch and discuss the live chat on WhiteHouse.gov and Facebook on Tuesday, September 28 at 3:00 p.m. EDT

Learn more about the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative:

• "Transforming Distressed Neighborhoods into Neighborhoods of Opportunity," posted by Melody Barnes
  
  
• Full description of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative
  
  
• Promise Neighborhood Awards Announcement
  
  
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/27/open-questions-neighborhood-revitalization-initiative

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From ICE

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Los Angeles human trafficking investigation featured in Reader's Digest

Alone and scared. That's the reality for many victims of human trafficking. Each year, nearly 20,000 people are trafficked to the U.S. - many of them women and children. These individuals endure traumatic journeys to enter the country, and once here, face lives of brutality, slavery and sex.

Journalist Mary A. Fischer details a recent Los Angeles human trafficking investigation led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Tracy Cormier in her recent Reader's Digest article, "Freedom Fighter."

Young girls from Guatemala, some as young as 13, were lured to America under the premise of finding "good jobs as nannies and waitresses," according to Fischer. However, she goes on to say, they are forced to live "under appalling conditions, often trapped in an insidious practice known as debt bondage-forced to repay neverending loans to their captors for travel, food, and shelter."

Fischer's article exposes the vile industry of human trafficking and how ICE agents, along with a network of law enforcement agencies, combat it. Those interested in reading the full version of "Freedom Fighter" can find it in the October 2010 Reader's Digest magazine or through a paid subscription to readersdigest.com .

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1009/100927losangeles.htm

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From the FBI

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Jury Convicts Laredo Police Department Officer of Conspiracy to Traffic Cocaine

Jury Acquits on Wire and Mail Fraud Charges Arising from Alleged Insurance Fraud Scheme

LAREDO, TX—A federal jury has convicted Laredo Police Department (LPD) officer Orlando Jesus Hale, aka Chacho, of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine and using a firearm in furtherance of that drug offense, United States Attorney José Angel Moreno announced today. The trial of Hale, 27, of Laredo, began on Sept. 20. Jury deliberations began on Sept. 24 and, after a weekend recess, resumed today and concluded with the return of the verdicts late this morning.

The jury convicted Hale of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine between Oct. 15, 2008, and Nov. 30, 2008, and using and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime and possessing the firearm in furtherance of the drug trafficking crime between Nov. 7 and Nov. 25, 2008.

During the trial, evidence was presented showing that Hale and a fellow LPD officer, Pedro Martinez III, met with an FBI undercover agent posing as a drug dealer in a hotel room in Laredo on Nov. 7, 2008. During the recorded meet, Hale and Martinez discussed how the two officers could escort loads of 20 kilograms each of cocaine from south to north Laredo using their personal vehicles and police-issued radios to monitor dispatch traffic.

On Nov. 13, 2008, first Martinez, then Hale, each escorted a load vehicle during afternoon rush-hour traffic. Each vehicle contained 20 kilograms of sham cocaine. On Nov. 25, Hale and Martinez arranged to meet the payoff person in San Antonio, Texas, to receive payment for the protective escort services they had provided. Hale and Martinez each received $1,000 from another undercover agent posing as the organization's moneyman. Martinez, who pleaded guilty prior to trial, testified against Hale.

Additional testimony heard during the trial in support of the fraud charges alleged in a superseding indictment detailed a scheme in which Hale allegedly asked Martinez whether he knew of any persons who might want their vehicles “stolen” (taken with their knowledge). The vehicle could be driven into and sold in Mexico, while the owner made a fraudulent claim of theft profiting from the theft through receipt of insurance proceeds and no longer having a loan payment. Martinez and Hale were also to profit from the scam, according to testimony. Two such “thefts” allegedly occurred on Oct. 24, 2008, then again on Dec. 13-14, 2008. The jury, however, acquitted Hale of the three mail fraud charges and one wire fraud charge alleged in the indictment arising from the alleged scheme.

The drug conspiracy conviction carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment and a maximum of life imprisonment along with a $4 million fine. The firearms conviction charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years' imprisonment upon conviction, which must be served consecutive or upon completion of any term of imprisonment imposed for the underlying drug offense as well as a $250,000 fine. Sentencing has been set for Jan. 10, 2011. Hale has been permitted to remain on bond pending sentencing.

The investigation leading to the charges was conducted by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Immigration Customs Enforcement - Homeland Security Investigations and Customs Border Protection with the assistance and cooperation of the LPD. Assistant United States Attorney Roberto F. Ramirez prosecuted the case.

http://sanantonio.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/sa092710.htm

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