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From the Los Angeles Times

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Official: Tijuana massacre may be related to pot bust

The execution-style killing of 13 people at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana on Sunday night might be related to a record-breaking bust last week of 134 tons of marijuana in the same city, Baja California state Atty. Gen. Rommel Moreno said, according to reports.

"That is also one of the elements we are following," Moreno said.

The attorney general provided no other details on a possible link as the investigation into the massacre continued in the northern border city across from San Diego. (Here's coverage in The Times on the burning of the seized marijuana on Wednesday.)

In recent weeks, Tijuana has been heralded as a success story in Mexico's drug war for its drop in violence over previous years, resulting in a slow return to more tourist-friendly days . Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke at a conference and festival in Tijuana earlier this month, but in the days after the event opened, "as if on cue," reported Richard Marosi in The Times, three headless bodies were hung from overpasses, among other killings.

The marijuana seized last week was bound for the United States, authorities said. Voters in California will decide next month whether to legalize the production and possession of small amounts of marijuana under Proposition 19, a proposal strongly opposed by Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/10/tijuana-massacre-marijuana-investigation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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Former child soldier convicted of murder in U.S. soldier's death

Omar Khadr, who was 15 when captured in Afghanistan, is expected to serve little additional time. He pleads guilty before the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunal.

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

October 26, 2010

Reporting from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

A former child soldier from Canada was convicted of war crimes Monday, the fifth prisoner brought to justice by military commissions since the controversial tribunal was created nearly nine years ago — the others being a cook, a propagandist, a driver and a onetime kangaroo skinner.

Omar Khadr, now a tall and burly 24-year-old, pleaded guilty to five charges, including the murder of U.S. special forces soldier Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer while fighting at age 15 with hardened Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan with whom his father had apprenticed him in 2002.

The conviction, for which Khadr is expected to serve little additional time, "puts a lie to the long-standing argument by some that Omar Khadr is a victim. He's not. He's a murderer," the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Navy Capt. John Murphy, said.

Human rights lawyers countered that the plea deal, under which Khadr would probably return to Canada in a year, does little to improve the tarnished image of the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunal.

Neither has the Obama administration succeeded in distancing itself from the controversial tribunal with what it hoped would "look like it gave a break to a child soldier who should never have been brought here at all," said Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First.

Despite an agreed-upon sentence, which was not publicly disclosed Monday but was rumored to be eight years, seven senior military officers will assemble Tuesday for a sentencing hearing. The jurors, or commissioners as they are known in this process, don't know the terms of Khadr's plea deal and will come to their own decision on the time he should serve. Khadr will be sentenced to the shorter of the two terms.

Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge, observed that Khadr would be eligible in one year to return to Canada and serve whatever remains of his sentence. His Canadian attorney, Dennis Edney, said the government had provided assurances that Canada would take back Khadr, despite resisting for years because of the radical behavior of his late father and older siblings.

As Parrish questioned Khadr about his understanding of the plea agreement, Speer's widow sat in the courtroom gallery, wiping away tears at the mention of the murder charge. Tabitha Speer is expected to testify for the prosecution and urge a more severe sentence.

Khadr, in an ill-fitting charcoal suit, was asked to affirm that he had committed all of the crimes detailed in a 50-point "stipulation." He muttered "yes" to each, with his head hung and a hand nervously flitting between his forehead and the microphone.

Three of the five convictions here — from among nearly 800 prisoners incarcerated since January 2002 — have been achieved through plea bargains. Australian David Hicks, the former kangaroo skinner and ninth-grade dropout, was freed in his homeland in less than nine months under a 2007 plea deal in which he admitted providing material support to Al Qaeda. Sudanese captive Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud Qosi, an Al Qaeda cook, is serving a reported two-year sentence.

Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan until the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was the first Guantanamo prisoner placed on trial in 2008. He was sentenced to just six months more than the time he had served.

The only trial resulting in lengthy punishment was that of Yemeni militant Ali Hamza Bahlul, a committed warrior who made propaganda videos for Al Qaeda. He declined to defend himself in his 2008 trial and is serving a life sentence.

Critics of the Guantanamo operations, which President Obama had vowed to close within a year of taking office, said the Khadr case demonstrated anew the failure of the military commissions process.

"We've waited two years for the president to make good on his promises," said Jennifer Turner, an attorney and researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union. Noting that U.S. federal courts have tried more than 400 terrorism suspects compared with the commissions' handful, Turner said the tribunal is "an unmitigated disaster and it's time to end it."

Some, though, saw Khadr's conviction as an important victory for the war crimes court, as he was the first captured in the act of anti-U.S. hostilities.

"Omar Khadr has finally stood up and admitted the truth," said Layne Morris, a sergeant with a Delta Force team who was wounded in the firefight that led to Khadr's capture.

Several passengers in a second second bus suffered injuries when the driver braked sharply to avoid hitting the bus that was struck by the BMW, said police Sgt.  Mitzi Grasso, an LAPD spokeswoman.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gitmo-plea-20101026,0,1281021,print.story

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Robert Hamilton of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office patrols Shelter Cove, a rural hamlet where pot growers occupy about half of the nearly 600 houses.

In Humboldt County, deputies' jobs can get hazy The region is a paradise for pot growers and an exasperating limbo for almost everyone else. 'I wish they would totally ban it … or just make it totally legal,' says one rural deputy. by Sam Quinones Los Angeles Times October 25, 2010 Reporting from Shelter Cove, Calif. Fantasy often mixes with reality in the work life of Deputy Sheriff Robert Hamilton of Humboldt County, the center of California's marijuana outback. It happened again a few months ago in the isolated coastal resort of Shelter Cove, where Hamilton lives and patrols. The deputy came upon nine young men tending a marijuana plantation. They said they'd come from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington and Ohio.

They'd rented a few apartments, then bought a half-acre of hillside. They clear-cut the land, put in "No Trespassing" signs and a couple of greenhouses, and terraced the rest of the property for farming.

They were raising 200 marijuana plants, each of which could produce 2 to 4 pounds of weed.

One of the young men, Jake Berlingeri, said the pot was for their own medicinal use. He recited the ailments afflicting these strapping men in their 20s.

"Well, Matt, he's got insomnia. I got shoulder problems, a torn rotator cuff," Berlingeri said. "Those two, they're not patients. But my boy Trav, he's got …."

Behind sunglasses, Hamilton smiled wryly and looked at the plants, labeled for their varieties: Headband, Mr. Nice, L.A. Confidential, Blue Dream, Amnesia, Purple Diesel, Ice Queen, Grapefruit, Blueberry and Sour Diesel.

He spent 13 years as a cop in Fresno, where mere possession of marijuana could lead to a felony arrest. But on this day, he made no arrests. Instead, he accepted a root beer from the growers and told them to display their medical marijuana prescriptions where he could see them. That way they'd have no problems with him.

"I'm a realist," Hamilton said as he drove away. "I know how this is working. It does no good to rip all these plants out or nitpick on fine details when nothing's going to happen."

In a region where marijuana is not merely tolerated but is a pillar of the economy, there isn't much a deputy can do but play along with the fantasies that surround semi-legal weed: that unemployed 20-somethings who buy $50,000 trucks earned the money legally; that supply shops for marijuana farmers are innocent home-and-garden centers; that growers who flash medical marijuana cards are not producing for sale but solely for their own medical needs.

"Cheech and Chong cannot smoke that much dope," Hamilton said.

To work in law enforcement in California pot country is to come face to face every day with the state's conflicted attitudes toward cannabis.

Humboldt County Dist. Atty. Paul Gallegos supports legalization of pot, and law enforcement officials say the office rarely prosecutes small-scale growers, who form a large and active political base here.

Nor can Hamilton or his fellow deputies do much about the thousands of unpermitted structures, essential to hiding indoor marijuana plants, that dot Humboldt County like buckshot.

A proposition on the Nov. 2 ballot would make it legal for people 21 and older to grow and use small amounts of marijuana, and it would allow California cities and counties to regulate and tax commercial cultivation. The boundary between legal and illegal weed would depend to a large degree on policies set by local governments.

A promise by U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder to enforce federal laws against recreational marijuana, even if the proposition passes, further complicates the picture.

So most likely Hamilton, 48, will continue to work in a gray zone.

A year into his assignment as Shelter Cove's live-in deputy, he is fed up with the ambiguity: "I wish they would totally ban it — zero tolerance — or just make it totally legal."

A grower's paradise

The resort was established in 1964 as a place for vacationers and retirees to build second homes on breathtaking coastline accessible by a single, winding two-lane road.

Over the years, marijuana farming came to Humboldt, first as a countercultural statement, then as a business. Shelter Cove was isolated, with minimal police presence, which made it attractive to growers. By the time Hamilton arrived in the fall of 2009, the place had become a concentrate of California's weird weed world.

Pot growers occupied about half of the nearly 600 houses. Young growers hung Scarface posters, drew the blinds and raised marijuana beneath 1,000-watt lights. Others put in greenhouses on denuded patches of hillside. Some installed sensors and hidden cameras to detect intruders.

When they raided large indoor operations, deputies often found photographs of the growers vacationing in places like Costa Rica and Bali.

"There's this outlaw mentality," Hamilton said. "They think they're these drug lords and they're going to take over southern Humboldt. You see them driving $40,000, $50,000 vehicles and they have no jobs."

For many years, development at Shelter Cove was limited by lack of electricity. Homeowners depended on generators. In 1983, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. ran an electrical line along the 21-mile road that connects the cove to Highway 101.

The line's limited capacity was more than adequate for a community where the average household use was a modest 500 to 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per month.

Then growers moved their crops indoors and installed high-intensity lights.

"We maxed out our system very quickly when this started," said Richard Culp, the resort's general manager. "We're seeing 5,000, 6,000, 8,000, 9,000 kilowatt-hours of use a month."

Hoping to halt the trend, the resort's utility nearly tripled the hourly rate for usage above 2,000 kilowatt-hours a month. When that made no difference, the rate for heavy usage was raised to five times the normal charge. Growers simply added more plants and lights to generate income to pay the extra cost.

The cove's backup generator had to be replaced, at a cost of $500,000. Last year, PG&E informed Shelter Cove that it would have to kick in $300,000 to expand the capacity of the electrical line.

In all, the resort estimates that indoor pot-growing has cost its residents more than $1 million since 2005.

Residents say indoor growing also brought a lawless feel to the cove: nighttime gunfire; planes landing and taking off in darkness from the resort's airstrip; late-night parties; trashed rental housing; truck races along Upper and Lower Pacific Drives.

"It was the wild, wild West," said Roger Boedecker, a member of the Shelter Cove Resort Improvement District board of directors. "The D.A.'s office is reputed not to be inclined to prosecute small growers. You can grow with impunity."

The indoor marijuana boom split Shelter Cove between younger growers, most of them renters, and older retirees, some of whom desperately hope for pot's legalization, believing it will drain the profits from illegal cultivation.

This was the situation Hamilton found when he arrived. He began by ticketing people for dilapidated trailers, for growing pot on land where they didn't live, which is against state law, or for living on land without a septic system. But Hamilton said the county's building department objected, saying he was doing its job, one he wasn't trained for.

He asked for guidance from the sheriff's department on what to do about full-grown plants capable of producing more pot than a medical marijuana user could possibly need. "Some of them are 8 feet tall, for God's sake," he wrote in an e-mail.

He was given a formula for calculating whether a grower was exceeding the county-permitted plant canopy of 100 square feet per medical patient.

"The current climate is to [go after] big commercial growers, ignore small grows," said Humboldt County Sheriff Gary Philp. "But you see more and more grow houses. If they're not going to be prosecuted, at a certain point they affect the community. We've had home invasions, shootings, homicides."

Gallegos, who is seeking a third term as district attorney, bridles at the idea that his office has been soft on illegal marijuana farming. He said he cracks down on illegal grow houses when he has the evidence, but also tries to protect patients' access to pot for legitimate medical needs.

"If someone has a [medical marijuana] recommendation, and they're within the ordinances, it's presumed they're lawful," Gallegos said. He faulted the county supervisors for enacting weak regulations on medical marijuana that, he said, invite abuse by commercial growers.

Far from these debates, Hamilton navigates the roads, armed with skepticism and a smile. Deputies in other counties may have broad citizen support. In marijuana country, he finds, it depends.

In May, Hamilton saved the life of a distraught woman who had slit her own throat with a butcher knife. Comments posted on blogs popular among growers were effusive in their praise of the deputy.

But the grower community also serves as an early-warning system. The sight of a sheriff's car activates a phone tree that Hamilton has found can extend to growers who live outside the county but own property there.

Once, when Hamilton was chasing a grower, word apparently spread and numerous slow-moving trucks appeared on the highway, hindering his progress. The suspect got away, he said.

"There's no community that we can sneak up on," Hamilton said.

Some Shelter Cove growers have objected to his mere presence.

A service organization known as the Shelter Cove Pioneers met in April to consider whether to renew its $200 monthly subsidy of Hamilton's rent, which makes it possible for him to live in the community. A few days earlier, several growers had joined the Pioneers, Hamilton said, and they had the votes to end the rent subsidy.

Their attitude seemed to be: "I'm growing marijuana, and I don't want this guy around," said Jim Blewett, Pioneer board president.

A group of residents later pooled their money to continue subsidizing Hamilton's rent. (At a Pioneers meeting this month, with many of the new members absent, the organization voted to resume the subsidy.)

"I knew it was a matter of time before those in the dope-growing community were going to start putting up a fuss. They don't like the prying eyes," Hamilton said. "You've got half the community that doesn't want it, and the other half that does."

Enforcement issues

Over the summer, Hamilton received tips that the young men he'd found raising marijuana on a hillside, supposedly for medical purposes, had been firing warning shots to scare off people who came near their plot, including two tourists interested in a nearby property for sale.

So he made a return visit in September. Hamilton said the caretaker, Joseph Florence, 20, was armed with a .22-caliber rifle and was wearing a military-style camouflage suit. It turned out he was wanted in Maryland for alleged methamphetamine distribution.

Hamilton saw that the marijuana plants had grown a lot since July. He measured them. The square-footage was three times what county regulations allow for the number of medical-marijuana cards the men had posted. A sheriff's eradication team uprooted the plants.

Florence was taken into custody, to be returned to Maryland. Hamilton has turned over his case file on the other men to the district attorney's office. But there are many bigger growers in Humboldt, and county government is spread thin.

"I don't believe anything will come of it," Hamilton said.

In Humboldt, the loss of the pot is often the punishment.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pot-deputy-20101026,0,1802959,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Licensed to not kill

Graduated-license laws in many states are credited for cutting the fatality rate among teenage drivers.

October 26, 2010

There was good news for the nation — and especially for California — in a report released last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control: Fatalities among teenage drivers have fallen steadily and markedly since the mid-1990s. From 2004-08 alone, they dropped by more than a third — and in California, by more than half. The state's fatality rate for teen drivers during those years was the third lowest in the nation.

This isn't just a happy coincidence. The CDC report notes that new air-bag regulations and other safety requirements for passenger vehicles helped keep teens safer during crashes. Higher gasoline prices and the tighter economy meant teenagers put in fewer miles behind the wheel.

But the CDC analysis attributes most of the drop to graduated-license laws, under which new teenage drivers are subject to restrictions on their driving privileges during the first year or two. In California, a 1998 law increased the amount of training 16- and 17-year-old drivers must receive before taking their driving test; then, for six months after being licensed, they must have adult supervision while driving late at night or with minors in the car. In 2006, the provisional-license period was doubled to a year. Whether it's that second law, the economy, just luck or most likely a combination of factors, the number of teenage driving fatalities in the state fell to 67 in 2008, barely more than half what it had been the year before.

Only New York and New Jersey, which have even more restrictive rules for the youngest drivers, showed lower death rates. The more rigorous the rules, the more lives saved. Teen drivers are more likely to be involved in car accidents when their colleagues go along for the ride — and the more teen passengers, the higher the chance of a crash.

Wyoming, take note. That state, with its unusually loose driving laws under which even some 14- and 15-year-olds can qualify for restricted licenses, also had by far the highest teen fatality rate in the CDC study, more than five times California's. Nationwide, traffic accidents remain the leading cause of teenage deaths in the United States.

There will be debate forever about the extent to which government should infringe on personal freedom, but there should be no argument about our collective responsibility to protect the safety of minors — and the innocent drivers and passengers who might be injured or killed in collisions with inexperienced, overconfident teen drivers. Findings such as these from the CDC should encourage Congress to set minimal graduated-license rules nationwide, tied to the disbursement of federal highway funds. Not all states necessarily need laws as restrictive as New Jersey's where drivers must turn 17 before obtaining a license, but better laws would continue to reduce deaths.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-driver-20101026,0,6408939,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Massacre in Tijuana Recalls Worst Era

MEXICO CITY — Thirteen people were killed at a drug rehabilitation clinic in Tijuana on Sunday night, a sign that the relative peace there celebrated recently by the president himself might be fracturing. The killings in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, follow the deaths of 14 young people in Ciudad Juárez, next to El Paso, who were gunned down at a party on Friday night.

They also came one week after the authorities in Tijuana seized and destroyed the largest load of marijuana in the country's history, and the police were investigating whether the killings were repercussions from a drug gang's lost haul.

The weekend of bloodshed renewed concerns over drug violence in the country, which has killed nearly 30,000 people in the past four years, mostly along drug trafficking routes on or near the border.

But the Tijuana killings raised a particular alarm because federal and local authorities have said that the city, where beheadings of police officers and other atrocities by drug gangs were common a couple of years ago, seemed to be turning a corner as a result of close cooperation among the military and the local police.

At a two-week conference this month in Tijuana to promote and encourage investment, President Felipe Calderón held the city up as a “clear example that the security challenge has a solution.”

The annual number of murders there came down in 2009 from a high of more than 800 two years ago. But, not counting the latest violence, there have been 639 killings this year, on a pace to match or surpass the 695 of last year. Analysts of the fight against drugs have questioned whether the city had achieved a relative peace or simply reached a lull.

A couple of headless bodies were found hanging from a bridge several miles away from the conference while it was in session.

As Mexico burned the 134 metric tons of marijuana seized last week, local journalists who follow the drug war speculated that the loss of so much marijuana would not go unpunished.

Rommel Moreno, the state prosecutor, said that was one explanation the authorities were considering for the attack.

The police said armed men stormed the drug rehabilitation center. Centers like that one frequently become targets in Mexico because drug gang members often seek treatment or hide in them.

In Ciudad Juárez, such clinics have been attacked repeatedly, and after the killings in Tijuana an unknown voice was heard over police radios saying, “This is a taste of Juárez,” in what the authorities saw as a threat. It appears the victims were lined up face down on the floor and shot with automatic weapons.

Frontera, a local newspaper, said the clinic was not registered with state medical authorities and appeared to be “clandestine.”

Either way, the killings were seen as a setback for a city where bars, restaurants and art galleries were once again attracting crowds, though Americans still largely keep away.

“It is something really troubling, above all since various authorities say we are among states that, in terms of security, have advanced and done it strongly,” Edmundo Guevara Márquez, president of the Business Coordinating Council, told reporters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/americas/26mexico.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Help Stop Bullying, U.S. Tells Educators

In a 10-page letter to be sent on Tuesday to thousands of school districts and colleges, the Department of Education urges the nation's educators to ensure that they are complying with their responsibilities to prevent harassment, as laid out in federal laws.

The letter is the product of a yearlong review of the federal statutes and case law covering sexual, racial and other forms of harassment, officials said. Issuing the letter took on new urgency in recent weeks because of a string of high-profile cases in which students have committed suicide after enduring bullying by classmates, the officials said.

In one case, Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, jumped from the George Washington Bridge in an apparent suicide last month, days after his roommate, according to prosecutors, streamed over the Internet his intimate encounter with another man.

The department issued the letter to clarify the legal responsibilities of the authorities in public schools and in colleges and universities under federal laws, the officials said. Certain forms of student bullying might violate federal anti-discrimination law.

“I am writing to remind you that some student misconduct that falls under a school's anti-bullying policy also may trigger responsibilities under one or more of the federal anti-discrimination laws,” says the letter, signed by Russlynn H. Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights.

According to data collected by the department's research wing last year, one-third of all students ages 12 to 18 felt that they were being bullied or harassed at school, Ms. Ali said in an interview.

“Folks need to wake up,” Ms. Ali said. “We have a crisis in our schools in which bullying and harassment seems to be a rite of passage, and it doesn't need to be that way.”

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cellphones or the Internet; or other conduct that may be physically threatening, harmful, or humiliating,” the letter says. “Harassment does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents. Harassment creates a hostile environment when the conduct is sufficiently severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school.”

Harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex or disability it violates the federal civil rights laws, the letter said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/education/26bully.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From  the Chicago Sun Times

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Half of high schoolers admit bullying someone

October 26, 2010

In what may be the largest study ever conducted on bullying, more than half of 42,000 public high school students surveyed around the U.S. told the Josephson Institute they hit a person because they were angry.

The survey found 57 percent of the boys and 48 percent of girls at public high schools say they hit a person because they were angry.

About half admitted they had bullied, teased or taunted someone in the past year and about the same percentage said they'd been seriously upset by being subjected to that behavior.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2835356,CST-NWS-bullying26.article

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Checking costs soar as banks impose new fees

RULES CHANGE | Consumers take hit as costs reach all-time high RULES CHANGE

October 26, 2010

BY SANDRA GUY

Checking-account fees have risen to an all-time high this year as banks seek to make up revenue they'll lose from new federal rules aimed at protecting consumers, according to a Bankrate Inc. study released today.

Many people will start seeing monthly service fees on their banking statements for the first time since the second Bush administration. That's because banks are seeking to regain revenue they will lose from new rules requiring them to stop charging people for overdraft protection unless the customer opts in, and limiting what banks charge retailers for debit-card transactions.

How much average fees rose since last year:

Consumers can save as much as $620 a year by staying in-network for their ATM withdrawals and avoiding checking-account overdrafts, according to Bankrate.

http://www.suntimes.com/business/2835584,CST-NWS-checks26.article

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Readout of Secretary Napolitano's Remarks at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference

Orlando, Fla. — Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today visited Orlando, Fla., to deliver remarks to law enforcement personnel from across the nation about continuing and expanding partnerships between DHS and state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement to combat evolving threats of terrorism at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Annual Conference.

"Today's threats put state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement around the country on the front lines of our counterterrorism effort in unprecedented ways," said Secretary Napolitano. "DHS is committed to getting resources, information and tools out of Washington, D.C. and into the hands of these brave men and women across the nation to combat new and evolving threats and keep our communities and our country safe."

In her remarks, Secretary Napolitano underscored that individuals prepared to carry out terrorist acts may carry out violence with little or no warning, requiring DHS and all of its law enforcement partners to adapt quickly to a rapidly evolving threat environment. She emphasized that the experience and skills state and local enforcement bring to fighting violent crime every day can be leveraged to counter threats like domestic terrorism, as homeland security begins with hometown security.

Secretary Napolitano also emphasized the Department's joint efforts with the Justice Department to expand the nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative—an Administration effort to train state and local law enforcement to recognize behaviors and indicators related to specific threats and terrorism-related crime; standardize how those observations are documented, vetted and analyzed; and expand and enhance the sharing of those reports with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS. This initiative is being implemented in partnership with state and local officials across the nation and has been launched in 19 locations.

She also highlighted the national expansion of DHS' "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign—a simple and effective program to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats and emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

Secretary Napolitano also underscored the vital role of the approximately 800,000 law enforcement officers at the federal, tribal, and local level, commending the sacrifice and commitment made by these men and women every day to secure our country.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1288025444400.shtm

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From the FBI

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Robert S. Mueller, III, Director

Federal Bureau of Investigation

International Association of Chiefs of Police

Good morning. It is an honor to be here. This is my 10th IACP conference, and I always look forward to meeting with you.

Your former president, Ron Ruecker, now serves as our assistant director for law enforcement, and he is doing a very good job.

As some of you may know, Ron is recovering from surgery. When I asked how he hurt himself, Ron hemmed and hawed, and admitted that he hurt his neck while playing golf.

Ron's predecessor in the FBI, Louie Quijas, loved a good game of golf. Well, he loved golf. No one said he was any good at golf. We used to joke that if you couldn't find Louie at his desk, you could find him on the back nine.

So when Ron came on board, I had one rule: no more golf. Since joining the FBI, Ron claims he has played just two rounds—both at the Major City Chiefs Conference in June. And it was there that he hurt himself.

Ron thought I was trying to prevent him from improving his game while on the clock. Actually, I was trying to save his life.

My first IACP conference took place seven weeks after September 11th.There was much discussion that year about whether to even hold a conference. Many of you did not want to leave your departments in a time of crisis.

In the end, you chose not to allow the events of that day to stop you from doing what needed to be done.

In the past nine years, we have gone about our business in new ways, with new partners. And we are all better and stronger for it.

But our mission remains the same: to do what we must to keep our citizens safe from crime and terrorism.

Let me begin with a brief overview of the current terrorist threat.

Nine years ago, al Qaeda was our primary concern. Today, we still confront the prospect of a large-scale attack by al Qaeda central.

But we also face a growing threat from al Qaeda affiliates, from the attempted Christmas Day bombing by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to the failed Times Square bombing by TTP, a militant group in Pakistan.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates may also attempt smaller attacks that require less planning and fewer operational steps—attacks that may be more difficult to detect and to prevent.

Threats from homegrown terrorists are also of great concern. These individuals are harder to detect, easily able to connect with other extremists on the Internet, and—in some instances—highly capable operationally.

For these reasons, terrorism is and must remain the FBI's top priority. But it is by no means our only priority.

We have seen firsthand the devastation caused by crime…communities where children cannot play outside for fear of being struck by a stray bullet…situations in which individuals have lost their life savings to fraud, corruption, and greed.

We have seen criminals lurking in the shadows of cyberspace…hostile foreign powers stealing our secrets…and organized criminal syndicates moving from money laundering to health care fraud and human trafficking.

We must continue to balance these diverse threats, because they are all threats to our national security.

Let me turn to the state of our relationship.

Ten years ago, when confronted by a surge in street crime, the migration of MS-13, or even a child abduction, the question to any one police department might have been, “What are you going to do about it? Today, the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

Our success comes down to two abiding principles: commitment and connectivity.

We are committed to working together to prevent crime and terrorism, here at home and with our partners around the world.

For example, agents and officers are working side-by-side to protect the Southwest border. The FBI and the LAPD have joined forces to close cold-case homicides—27 cases in just three months.

With our partners in New York, New Jersey, Nebraska, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, we recently disrupted an international ring of computer hackers. And just two weeks ago, together we arrested 73 individuals running the largest Medicare fraud scheme in history.

There was a day in law enforcement when teamwork and partnership were virtues. But today, they are absolute necessities. And yet we are more than just colleagues. We have become trusted partners and, indeed, friends.

The National Academy is another focal point of commitment and connectivity. Many of you have yellow bricks on your desks and in your bookcases.

And with more than 44,000 yellow bricks around the world, and 1,000 new bricks every year, you can pick up the phone and find the help you need, day or night. The National Academy reminds us that we are all part of the larger law enforcement family.

I now have attended nearly 40 National Academy graduations. Each time, I am struck by the fact that officers from across the country and around the world willingly leave their families and their departments to come to Quantico for 10 weeks.

One of my favorite stories comes from an earlier session. Those of you who graduated recently may have heard it before, but it is worth repeating.

Some time after he graduated, one former student was reminiscing at the breakfast table about the good times he had at Quantico. He said that the 10 weeks he spent at the academy were the best 10 weeks of his life. His teenage daughter looked at him and said, “Dad, to be perfectly honest, they were the best 10 weeks of my life, too!” From that perspective, it is a “win-win” for the officers and their families alike.

From time to time, some have said that we should cut the budget for the National Academy. And the answer has always been a resounding “no.”

A few years back, I myself might have suggested that we shorten the program by two weeks. The reply was, “Director, you will not interfere with the National Academy.” I will say the word “Director” was used rather loosely.

Your state and local fusion centers are another strong example of collaboration. In a few moments, Secretary Napolitano will speak about the importance of working together to strengthen these partnerships.

Our special agents in charge have examined each fusion center to determine where we need to enhance our cooperation. We now have FBI personnel assigned to more than 80 percent of these fusion centers. And we will continue to increase our participation.

Turning for a moment to Joint Terrorism Task Forces…the 104 JTTFs are among our longest running and most successful partnerships. They are at the center of our collective efforts to prevent terrorism.

Consider the Zazi case. Najibullah Zazi was arrested last year in connection with a plot to bomb the New York subway system. He was working on behalf of al Qaeda. The Denver and New York JTTFs tracked and ultimately stopped Zazi before he could execute his attack.

This is how our partnership can and should work, every day, in every case.

We have also strengthened our connectivity, in terms of sharing information.

When I was the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, the law enforcement community in the Bay Area sought to enhance information sharing. We found that databases in San Francisco could not share information with databases in Contra Costa or Marin or Santa Clara.

Aside from the technical issues, there were policy concerns to overcome. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose would generally see these issues in the same way.

But then there was Berkeley, which had a different take on things.

We have made substantial progress since then and overcome many of these hurdles. But we still have a ways to go.

Let me talk briefly about two new tools that will further improve our information sharing: N-Dex and e-Guardian.

First, N-DEx. N-DEx gives criminal justice agencies a tool to search, link, and share criminal information on a national scale.

To date, more than 100 million records have been included in the N-DEx database, from more than 3,000 agencies. Data includes incarceration records and information about cases and persons of interest, with phone numbers, associates, and locations.

N-DEx is not just the flow of information from you to the FBI—it is one of the best ways we can share information with you in real time.

For example, this past spring, a homicide detective in Oregon was searching for several individuals who lived out of state. Using N-DEx, he found records on these same individuals in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He traveled to Los Angeles to interview one of the individuals, and obtained sufficient evidence to extradite him to Oregon, where he is currently awaiting trial.

In San Diego, the license plate for a getaway car in a bank robbery was traced to a woman with no criminal record in California. But when investigators ran her name through N-DEx, records revealed that she had a criminal history of bank robbery, with a list of possible accomplices in two other states.

N-DEx has the potential to be a “game-changer,” much like the National Criminal Information Center was more than 40 years ago. We will continue to make N-DEx easier to access and to use. And we will continue to add new partners and new information.

Another important tool is the FBI's e-Guardian system.

E-Guardian makes the FBI's terrorist threat and suspicious activity information readily available to state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners. In turn, any threat or suspicious activity information provided by law enforcement will be added to e-Guardian and pushed out to Joint Terrorism Task Forces. I should add that we look forward to the inclusion of SARs from fusion centers and DHS, which will only make information sharing that much more effective.

Just as we are making use of new technology, so are criminals and terrorists. And this has made electronic surveillance and threat warning more difficult for all of us.

Critical laws covering court-ordered intercepts have not been updated since 1994, when we moved from a copper-wire phone system to digital networks and cell phones.

Technology, however, has expanded exponentially since then. And many providers are not equipped to deliver copies of communications in response to court orders.

We all face the same challenge. The majority of our cases have criminals using some form of electronic means to communicate. We must find a way to access the information we need to protect public safety, and the evidence we need to bring criminals to justice.

Together with the Department of Justice, the IACP, and key law enforcement groups, we are working both to update the laws and to create a national resource center to address this complex issue.

In particular, I want to recognize your incoming president, Mark Marshall, as well as Pete Modafferi, Harlan McEwen, and Rick Fuentes. They have been instrumental in moving this ball forward.

This is my final IACP Conference as Director of the FBI, and with that comes a degree of nostalgia.

Today, we all understand that the foundation of our partnership rests not only on training, task forces, and technology, but on friendship and trust…on our willingness to pick up the phone, walk across the hall, or meet after work for a beer or a glass of wine.

And we know that this foundation of friendship will outlast any Director, any police chief, any agent, and any officer.

We are smarter and stronger than we were 10 years ago. And it is my hope that 10 years from now, we will be stronger still, with new leaders, new perspectives, and continued success.

As always, thank you for having me here today. It has been my honor and my privilege to work with each of you over the last several years.

Thank you and God bless.

http://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/mueller_102510

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From the DEA

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DEA Investigation Results in 68 Individuals Indicted for Drug Trafficking in Loíza, Puerto Rico

Forfeiture allegations for 16 million dollars

OCT 25 -- SAN JUAN, PR – On October 20, 2010, a federal grand jury indicted sixty-eight (68) individuals as a result of an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau (ATF) and the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD), announced today United States Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez. The defendants are charged in three separate two-count indictments, with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to possess and use firearms during and in relation to a drug related offense.

The first indictment charges fifty-one (51) individuals from the Villa Cañona Ward II in Loíza, lead by Jeremil Escalera Rivera, aka “Jerry,” Luis Matta Quiñones, aka “Bala,” and Victor L. Matta Quiñones. These co-conspirators had many roles, in order to further the goals of the conspiracy, including: three (3) leaders and owners, two (2) enforcers, five (5) runners, forty-three (43) sellers, and three (3) facilitators and providers of storage facilities. Count two charges twenty-two (22) defendants with using and carrying firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime. It was further part of the conspiracy that the leaders would distribute samples of narcotic substances among the drug addicts in order to have them test the narcotics.

The second indictment charges ten (10) defendants in a drug trafficking organization that operated in Villa Cañona II ward since January 2007. This organization, lead by Alexander Rodríguez Ríos, aka “Alex Cano”, was selling crack and marijuana within one thousand (1,000) feet from the elementary public school Celso González Villaran and the María de la Cruz head Start pre-school. Three (3) co-conspirators are charged with conspiracy to use and possess firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime.

The third indictment charges fifteen (15) individuals lead by Yesenia Cruz Romero, who operated a crack drug point at Villa Cañona I, one thousand (1,000) feet from the elementary public school Celso González Villaran and the María de la Cruz Head Start pre-school. Five (5) co-conspirators are charged of conspiracy to use and possess firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime.

“ Federal and state law enforcement agencies joined forces to remove these drug trafficking organizations which for many years had been intimidating the citizens of the municipality of Loíza with their violence and had been spreading the scourge of illegal drugs in this town and neighboring communities ,” said U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez. “Today's operation is part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCEDTF) and our ongoing efforts to continue to fight drug trafficking in Puerto Rico.”

“Today DEA shuts down the principal and most lucrative heroin, crack, and marijuana distribution center in the town of Loíza and the entire northeast region of Puerto Rico,” said Javier F. Peña, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Caribbean Division. “DEA's enduring efforts with our OCDETF partners have one goal: to cut violence in Loíza by demolishing these three violent drug trafficking organizations.”

“This investigation is just another example of collaboration and partnerships between ATF, our Federal law enforcement brethren, and the Police of Puerto Rico in the never ending battle to stem the flow of illegal firearms and narcotics into our communities,” said Hugo Barrera, Special Agent In Charge of ATF.  “These armed individuals terrorized the community of Loíza and we are proud to be members of this investigation to thwart these criminal organizations.”

The case was investigated by DEA, ATF and PRPD, and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Carmen Márquez and Ilianys Rivera.

If convicted, the defendants face a minimum of ten (10) years imprisonment and a maximum of life imprisonment, with fines of up to $4 million. Criminal indictments are only charges and not evidence of guilt. A defendant is presumed to be innocent until and unless proven guilty.

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/2010/carib102510.html

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