~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the Los Angeles Times

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cargo plane bombs were wired to explode, officials say

In Yemen, a woman is arrested in connection with the two parcels bound for the U.S.

By Ken Dilanian, Richard Serrano and Brian Bennett, Tribune Washington Bureau

October 31, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The two bombs concealed in U.S.-bound packages found on cargo planes in Britain and the United Arab Emirates were wired to explode, at least one via a cellphone detonator, and were powerful enough to bring down an aircraft, U.S. and British officials said Saturday.

A Yemeni official in Washington said a woman was arrested in Yemen in connection with sending the packages and that a relative, whom the official identified as either her mother or sister, was being interrogated.

"The woman was arrested based on a tip from foreign intelligence," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "Her name and phone number were provided."

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said in a short news conference Saturday that Yemeni forces acted on a tip from U.S. officials, who had passed along a telephone trace.

The two bomb packages, addressed to Jewish organizations in Chicago, were intercepted Friday in airports in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and East Midlands, England, after a detailed tip from Saudi intelligence that included package tracking numbers, U.S. officials say. The Dubai package was sent via FedEx, and the package to England went via UPS. Initial reports had said that both were UPS parcels and that both had been found late Thursday.

A search of 15 other suspicious packages from Yemen turned up no bombs, a U.S. law enforcement source said.

U.S. officials are still trying to piece together the intent of the plot, which they suspect was carried out by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's affiliate in Yemen.  

It's unclear how the Saudis were clued in, but this month a leader of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen, Jabir Jubran Fayfi, turned himself in to the Saudi government. Picked up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2001, he had been held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before being turned over to Saudi Arabia. He went through a rehabilitation program for militants and was released, only to rejoin Al Qaeda in 2006.

But Fayfi contacted Saudi authorities from Yemen to express his regret and readiness to surrender, the Saudi Interior Ministry said in a statement Oct 15.

On Saturday, authorities were investigating whether the plot sought to blow up the cargo planes in midair or upon landing — or whether the bombs were intended for the Chicago addresses on the packages. 

British Home Secretary Theresa May said Saturday in London that the target of the bomb found in her country may have been an aircraft, though "we do not believe that the perpetrators of the attack would have known the location of the device when it was planned to explode."

As President Obama campaigned this weekend, he kept tabs on the investigation. He discussed the plot in phone calls Saturday with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Saudi King Abdullah.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), after briefings from Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said in an interview that the bombs were fashioned out of the chemical explosive PETN, the substance used in the attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

"But this was 10 times bigger," said a federal law enforcement official, who said the packages contained "about a pound each" of PETN.               

"The fact that PETN was used in this plot is worrisome," said a U.S. intelligence official not authorized to speak for attribution. "PETN is hard to detect and lends itself to being concealed. It is not hard to make, but it takes some sophistication to conceal the explosives in the right way. It packs a punch. You don't need that much of it to blow a hole in an aircraft."

U.S. officials have said that the Christmas Day bomb was built by Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, who also reportedly built a PETN device in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the top Saudi counter-terrorism official last year.

One of the bombs found Friday was wired for remote detonation via cellphone, Harman said, and the other was linked to a timer but lacked a triggering device. The remote detonation setup "leads me to speculate that … people had [detonators] on the ground somewhere in Chicago," she said.

At least one of the addresses in Chicago was for a church that had been used at one time by a Jewish congregation, but not for seven years. The bomb discovered in Dubai was wired to a SIM card, a portable memory chip typically used in mobile phones, said Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who serves on the intelligence and homeland security committees.

"The bombs were made to look like ink cartridges — like for a big Xerox machine," he said.

Napolitano, interviewed on several television shows Saturday, would not say whether the bombs would have been detected by current screening procedures without the information from Saudi intelligence. Most cargo bound for the U.S. is screened by foreign governments, and 38% is not screened at all, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The foiled attack is putting renewed scrutiny on Yemen, a nearly failed state that officials said has become an increasing hotbed of terrorist planning.

"Outside of the Afghan-Pakistan area where the Al Qaeda core and the senior leadership reside, I would say that the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is the most active operational franchise right now of Al Qaeda, and that this is one that deserves a lot of our attention," White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan said Friday.

Stratfor, a Texas-based private intelligence firm, said in an e-mail Saturday that even though the plot did not inflict physical damage, it "severely disrupted the operations of two U.S.-based multibillion-dollar shipping corporations, preoccupied U.S., Saudi, Emirati and British security and intelligence officials and effectively sowed terror across much of the West."

Sandra Munoz, a spokeswoman for FedEx, disputed that. "Our operations were normal," she said, other than the suspension of package delivery from Yemen.

U.S. law enforcement officials said they were increasingly intrigued by another Yemeni figure released to the Saudis in 2006, Uthman Ghamdi, also a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

Ghamdi reportedly has surfaced as a right-hand man to Anwar Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric thought to be living in Yemen. Both men are considered top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Ghamdi recently wrote a memoir for Inspire magazine, an Al Qaeda online quarterly, in which he describes being flown to Guantanamo aboard a cargo plane, a link that officials said could give him a reason to want to strike at cargo aircraft.

He wrote that he was flown "for a long journey" to Guantanamo Bay in 2002. "We were not allowed to speak or move and we were prevented from seeing or hearing anything," he wrote.

Ghamdi, who had been captured in Pakistan, was released from Guantanamo in 2006 and repatriated to Saudi Arabia. But like some of the other released captives, he soon took up the fight again.

In 2009, the Saudi government listed him among their 85 "most wanted" terrorism suspects. Ten other former captives also made the list. Ghamdi reportedly soon left Saudi Arabia for Yemen.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cargo-planes-20101031,0,7280444,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yemeni security forces are seen outside a FedEx branch in Sana. Yemen launched a probe after explosives were found in air parcels sent to U.S. synagogues from its territory by suspected Al Qaeda militants whom it is under renewed pressure to eliminate.

A fractured Yemen frustrates U.S. efforts to weaken Al Qaeda there The country's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, needs foreign support to defeat militants, but competing clans, rebellions and corruption make it difficult to satisfy Western interests. by Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times October 31, 2010 Reporting from Cairo U.S. efforts to weaken the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen have collided with that nation's political reality as President Ali Abdullah Saleh needs foreign support to defeat militants but cannot appear to appease Western interests in a country where distrust of America runs deep. Yemen is a freewheeling mix of clan loyalties, rebellions in the north and south and suspicion of the government that in recent years has made it an ideal gathering ground for Al Qaeda. Echoing the quandary Washington faces battling militants in Pakistan, Yemen is marked by corruption and, at times, what seems to be a calculated inability to crush militant elements.

The Obama administration has intensified pressure on Saleh, and Friday's foiled terrorist plot may lead to increased U.S. military involvement in Yemen. The U.S. has not commented on reports in December that it carried out airstrikes in Yemen that killed as many as 10 militants and at least 40 civilians.

Washington is also seeking to assassinate Anwar Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who has emerged as a leader in the militant group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. investigators believe the preacher inspired Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to go on a shooting rampage last year at Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32.

Islamic militants, many of whom could seek refuge in their tribes, were tolerated inside Yemen for years as long as they aimed their attacks on other countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Western intelligence officials have gradually convinced Saleh that Al Qaeda's intentions also include targeting him and his family.

The Yemeni government has stepped up military actions against Al Qaeda, which is believed to have several hundred fighters, mostly Yemeni and Saudi nationals. How effective those operations have been remains an open question. The Yemeni news agency reported over the weekend that a raid involving 1,000 troops and 500 tribesmen loyal to the government ended when no militants were found in Shabwa province, a haven for militants in the southern part of the country.

Saleh, who once likened ruling Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes, has other pressing concerns: A rebellion by Houthi tribesmen in the north, which sparked widespread destruction and tens of thousands of refugees, sporadically flares. And in the south, the government is trying to contain a secessionist movement that many analysts say is more dangerous to Saleh than Al Qaeda.

The key to Saleh's success over nearly three decades in power has been his manipulating of tribes with promises, money and infrastructure projects. But largess is getting tight and there is disenchantment in the outlands, most notably after strikes against Al Qaeda also have mistakenly killed tribesmen and their families.

Saleh's critics contend that the president benefits from Al Qaeda and other threats. The air of instability, especially at a time of concern over international terrorism, has brought outside support for the government and brought foreign dollars into the country to pay for humanitarian and military operations.

Yemen's biggest donor is Saudi Arabia, which has tightened its border to prevent militants from sneaking in and launching attacks, such as a 2009 suicide bombing that nearly killed a prince. The U.S. is expected to significantly increase aid in coming years as attention to Yemen grows similar to what it was immediately after the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole that killed 17 sailors in 2000.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-yemen-al-qaeda-20101031,0,2115597.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

U.S. steps up screening as debate flares about cargo security

Without a tip from Saudi Arabia, two bombs might not have been detected.

By Brian Bennett, Tribune Washington Bureau

October 31, 2010

Reporting from Washington

U.S. officials dramatically increased the screening of incoming air cargo after the interception Friday of two explosive devices believed to have originated in Yemen, as a renewed debate emerged over how many resources federal officials and private companies should devote to such screening.

The packages from Yemen contained chemical explosives camouflaged as printer cartridges and wired to be detonated by a cellphone. They were found in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and England only after the U.S. received a tip from Saudi Arabia.

"Without this intelligence, it is likely they would have slipped through the security measures we have in place," said U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R- Texas), a Homeland Security committee member who was briefed on the plot.

He said the bombs "have exposed a weakness in the way that cargo is screened on its way to the U.S." and that terrorists have identified that vulnerability. "This opens everybody's eyes up," McCaul said.

The U.S. checks incoming foreign parcels using a network of government-certified private screeners and companies as well as its own inspectors at about 18 gateway airports around the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

As of August, about 38% of cargo coming into the U.S. was not being screened, according to the TSA.

The bomb plot is likely to spark a call in Congress to push for 100% screening, McCaul predicted Saturday. One challenge, he added, will be how "to balance security and commerce on this matter."

The sheer numbers of packages flowing through the $100-billion global air freight industry is daunting. UPS, which was the courier for one of the explosive packages and had three planes inspected at U.S. airports on Friday, ships 15 million parcels a day worldwide. FedEx, which was transporting the other package, ships about 8 million.

"We have to find that balance" between security and a timely operation, said UPS spokeswoman Karen Cole. "We have a lot of security checkpoints and systems to make sure that network is secure."

Shipment data are transmitted to the Department of Homeland Security at least four hours before any cargo plane lands on U.S. soil. Department officials then analyze the data about the packages' origins and destinations to identify "high risk" cargo to be inspected.

In addition, all inbound packages weighing more than 150 pounds are searched, and smaller packages could be inspected by bomb-sniffing dogs while in transit, according to U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), chairwoman of the Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee.

Citing security concerns, TSA officials declined to describe the inspection methods. The minimum inspection criteria have been temporarily elevated, officials said.

In June, TSA Assistant Administrator John Sammon told Congress that the agency had a goal of screening 100% of incoming international cargo by 2013.

The TSA has said that effort will be limited by existing technology's inability to quickly and accurately screen packages as well as the difficulty of relying on screening programs run by foreign governments.

In recent years, the TSA has increased domestic screening programs.

As of August, TSA or certified screeners have been checking all cargo on domestic passenger planes and on international passenger flights to the U.S. that are labeled "high-risk." The TSA has certified more than 1,200 cargo screening facilities in the U.S.

The mail bomb threat prompted the Department of Homeland Security to roll out additional safety measures at passenger airports. An "unpredictable mix" of security layers for passengers was implemented, the TSA announced, including explosives detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs and additional pat-downs.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cargo-inspections-20101031,0,3299916,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MUSLIM WORLD: Young European man explains why he converted to Islam

The story of Malcolm is intriguing, and perhaps a bit puzzling.

Why would a left-leaning young man from one of the world's most secular and liberal countries choose to become a pious Muslim?

The 34-year old Swedish music teacher from Stockholm, who asked that his last name not be published, attempted to explain his decision, describing it as the culmination of a long journey searching for faith and him solidifying his religious beliefs that he couldn't always place.

“I have never doubted my faith," he told Babylon & Beyond while on a recent visit to Beirut. "It feels like I've had the same faith all the time but it feels so cleanly formulated in Islam."

For Malcolm, becoming a Muslim gave him a connection to others in a country where identity is not always clean-cut.

"I feel very comfortable as a Muslim.... We're social creatures and we want to feel a sense of belonging," he said. "If it's not a clan it's a nation or a soccer team. For me it's nice to have a belonging which is not a nation or a football team."

Growing up in predominantly Protestant Sweden, Malcolm's doubts about his faith lingered as he got older.

He started to study different religions and read philosophy texts. He felt drawn to Islam and fascinated by its teachings, especially to what he says is the religion's focus on seeking knowledge.

He used the Internet to learn about Islam and the Koran, dedicating many hours in front of his computer learning how to recite the Koran and memorizing its chapters.

Malcolm wasn't the only member of his family who embraced Islam. His brother, too, became a Muslim.

The day he "officially" became a Muslim some three years ago will be forever ingrained in his memory.

He had attended Friday prayer service in the grand mosque of Stockholm, when after the program an Imam reached for the microphone and called out in the loudspeakers before the jampacked crowd: “Now, we have a brother here who will say the Shahada ,” the Muslim declaration of belief.

The room became quiet as the blond-haired, blue-eyed Swede got up from his seat and started to read out the text alongside the imam in Arabic. From a stand above in the women's section, his Muslim wife was watching him. 

“It felt big. When it was over everyone came up to hug and congratulate me ... one guy from Morocco gave me a kaftan as a gift," Malcolm said.

Since then, then 34-year old strictly observed the rules of Islam. There is no more pork on his dinner plate or drinking of alcohol, no gambling in casinos on the weekends. During the holy month of Ramadan, he fasts. Whenever he can, he attends Friday prayer service at a mosque. 

His brother, he said, observered Islam even more strictly.

What's the appeal? In part, Malcolm said, Islam fits in well with his left-wing views. "In that sense, Islam fits me really well," he said. "I am completely against capitalism."

As a Muslim living in Europe, Malcolm is also concerned about what he and others see as the bashing of Islam in the region as acted out in French burka bans, a Swiss decree to ban the building of minarets and the rise of far-right political parties in several European nations.

In September, Sweden made international headlines when it voted the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party into Parliament . Members of the party have called Islam “un-Swedish” and said that Muslims should be driven out of Sweden with a policy of “sticks and carrots.”

Photo: Malcolm, a 34-year old Swedish music teacher, converted to Islam a couple of years ago.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/10/muslim-world-convert-jihad-christianity-islam-politics-europe-islamophobia-koran-prophet.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BabylonBeyond+%28Babylon+%26+Beyond+Blog%29

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Crime falls 40% in neighborhoods with Summer Night Lights program

The program offers recreation, mentoring, counseling and food in troubled L.A. neighborhoods until midnight. It operated at 24 sites this year may be expanded.

By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer

October 31, 2010

Serious gang-related crime has tumbled 40% over the last three years in the troubled neighborhoods surrounding the sites of Summer Night Lights, Los Angeles' park program designed to curb violence, newly assembled police data show.

This was the third summer that City Hall has run Summer Night Lights, offering recreational activities, mentoring and counseling programs, meals and other services at parks and public housing complexes.

Launched in the summer of 2008, Summer Night Lights expanded to 24 sites this year. Hours at each site were extended until midnight four days a week in the effort to provide safe, healthful activities in the hours when most violent crime occurs.

The program's backers have reason to tout the crime-reduction data. Some city officials hope to expand to 32 sites next summer, even though Los Angeles is facing, by some estimates, a $320-million budget shortfall.

Crime has long been falling across Los Angeles; overall, crime has declined by 7.5% so far this year and is on pace to fall citywide for the ninth consecutive year. But serious gang-related crime — including murder, rape and robbery — has in many cases fallen at even greater rates in the neighborhoods surrounding Summer Night Lights sites. For example, in the 10 neighborhoods where the city added Summer Night Lights programs in 2010, serious gang-related crime fell 39.7% this summer.

Some of the declines at the new sites were striking — from 19 serious crimes to six in the neighborhood surrounding Highland Park Recreation Center; from 35 to 16 near the Van Ness Recreation Center.

Overall, serious gang-related crime has fallen 40.4% in the Summer Night Lights neighborhoods when compared with the summer of 2007, the summer before the program began.

"There are not many places other than Summer Night Lights where people allow their kids to be in that kind of setting," said Jerald Cavitt, a veteran gang-intervention worker and a coordinator of Summer Night Lights programming at Mt. Carmel Recreation Center in the Vermont-Slauson neighborhood of South L.A. In these neighborhoods, Cavitt said, "you just don't play sports until 12 at night. We had skateboarding, popcorn and movie nights, intervention, mentoring — you name it."

An audit found that residents made 710,000 visits to the 24 sites between July 7 and Sept. 4 this summer. On average, 10,929 people were served free meals each night.

"You are there to feed these neighborhoods, literally and symbolically," said Deputy Mayor Guillermo Cespedes, who runs City Hall's Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development and is an architect of the program. "This isn't a soup kitchen. This is literally nourishing the neighborhood."

The program cost roughly $5.4 million; half of that came from private donors and half from public sources. Cespedes said he is sensitive to the fact that Los Angeles is in dire financial straits, but he noted that violent crime comes with significant costs of its own.

One recent academic study determined that homicides cost the public more than $17 million apiece in justice system costs, lost productivity and efforts to combat future crime. From 2009 to 2010, gang-related homicides in the neighborhoods surrounding the 10 newly added sites fell from nine to three.

"These neighborhoods are capable of transforming themselves away from violence," Cespedes said. "They will choose this over body bags. That's what happened this summer.... In a time of budget crisis, the city cannot afford to not do this program. It doesn't solve all of the problems we need to solve. But it is a wise strategy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-summer-night-20101030,0,4336841.story?track=rss

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OPINION

Justice in slow motion

LAPD Det. Thomas Williams' killer has been on death row for 22 years as appeals drag on.

By Arnold Friedman

October 31, 2010

On Oct. 31, 1985, Los Angeles Police Det. Thomas C. Williams was shot to death while picking up his 6-year-old son from church school. The 42-year-old had just come from the San Fernando courthouse, where the trial of a robbery suspect he'd apprehended would end the next day.

In the split second before Williams was struck by eight shots from a fully automatic assault pistol, he ordered his son Ryan to duck. By immediately complying, the boy was spared. His father died instantly. In addition to his son, Williams left behind a 17-year-old daughter, Susan, and his wife, Norma.

The killing was proclaimed an assassination by then-Police Chief Daryl Gates, and Daniel Steven Jenkins, the defendant in the robbery case, was charged with Williams' murder.

Tom Williams and I were fraternity brothers at Cal State Northridge in the days when it was known as San Fernando Valley State College. Years later, when I was a Daily News reporter covering crime, I was careful not to trade on our friendship, but he was helpful when he could be. I would have been covering the Jenkins robbery trial had it not conflicted with a vacation.

I did follow Jenkins' subsequent legal battles, and sat in the courtroom through much of his murder trial. He was convicted in both the robbery and murder cases. He was also convicted of conspiracy stemming from failed plots to kill the detective before the robbery trial. In 1988, he was sentenced to die for Williams' murder.

But 22 years later, Jenkins is still on death row at San Quentin State Prison, and he is still appealing his sentence with habeas corpus petitions before both the California Supreme Court and federal district court.

Jenkins' court-appointed appellate attorney, Michael Snedeker, says 50,000 pages of documents have been generated in the case since his client was charged with Williams' murder. When Snedeker was appointed to the case, his wife was pregnant with their first son. The boy is now a junior in college. Snedeker predicts the appeals process will run for years to come. And the state pays the tab for all of it.

The Jenkins case illustrates why there have been only 13 executions in California since the death penalty was reinstated 33 years ago. During that time, the death row population has ballooned to 713, by far the largest in the nation. At the opposite extreme, there have been 464 executions in Texas since 1982. Currently, 317 Texas inmates wait on death row.

According to state corrections figures, four times as many inmates have died of natural causes (52) as by execution in California since 1977. In addition, 18 have committed suicide. So that leaves executions stuck in third place among the causes of death on death row.

California is in a bind. On the one hand, death sentences are on the rise (29 last year and 22 so far this year), and the public still supports this ultimate penalty for the most serious crimes. On the other hand, a court has imposed a moratorium on executions pending a review of California's method of carrying out death sentences.

Moreover, the cost of perpetuating capital punishment in California is a large and growing burden. The annual cost to the state was placed at $125 million in 2008 by the bipartisan California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which was appointed to review the state's death penalty. Additionally, state officials are scheduled to open bids next month for construction of a larger, higher-security death row on the San Quentin grounds. The estimated cost for the new death row is nearly $400 million.

When Jenkins was first sentenced to death, I regarded it as justified. But recently, after talking to many death penalty experts, I have come to question whether executions in California make sense. Santa Clara Law School professor Gerald F. Uelmen, who served as executive director on the California commission that examined death penalty issues in the state, argues that the cash-strapped state government could reap a huge savings by doing away with the death penalty and reducing the sentences of everyone on death row to life without possibility of parole. Uelmen says the cost would be three times less than it is for holding and paying for the appeals of death row inmates. He says lifers' appeals are usually decided within a year or two, after which the vast number of them simply spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Law professor Elisabeth Semel, director of the UC Berkeley School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic, suggests another reason for dispensing with capital punishment. The families of murder victims deserve an ending, she says. Semel is well aware of the frustration and disgust experienced by family members as they wait year after year for the killers of their loved ones to exhaust their appeals. In contrast, the faster-paced appeals for those sentenced to life without parole would enable an ending that many families of victims might find more palatable than the death row uncertainty.

If Jenkins' sentence were converted to life without parole, his appeal would be swiftly resolved, and in all likelihood he would be stripped of his greatest current asset — hope. That's an appealing idea.

Arnold Friedman is a Los Angeles writer specializing in the criminal justice system and politics.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-friedman-death-penalty-20101031,0,6458104,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the New York Times

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

U.S. Sees Complexity of Bombs as Link to Al Qaeda

WASHINGTON — The powerful bombs concealed inside cargo packages and destined for the United States were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated, American officials said Saturday, further evidence that Al Qaeda 's affiliate in Yemen is steadily improving its abilities to strike on American soil.

As investigators on three continents conducted forensic analyses of two bombs shipped from Yemen and intercepted Friday in Britain and Dubai, American officials said evidence was mounting that the top leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including the radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki , was behind the attempted attacks.

Yemeni officials on Saturday announced the arrest of a young woman and her mother in connection with the plot, which also may have involved two language schools in Yemen. The two women were not identified, but a defense lawyer who has been in contact with the family, Abdul Rahman Barham, said the daughter was a 22 year-old engineering student at Sana University.

Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh , said Saturday night during a news conference that Yemeni security forces had identified her based on a tip from American officials, but he did not indicate her suspected role.

Investigators said that the bomb discovered at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates was concealed in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer, with high explosives packed into a printer cartridge to avoid detection by scanners.

“The wiring of the device indicates that this was done by professionals,” said one official involved in the investigation, who like several officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing. “It was set up so that if you scan it, all the printer components would look right.”

The bomb discovered in Britain was also hidden in a printer cartridge.

The terror plot broke publicly in dramatic fashion on Friday morning, when the two packages containing explosives and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago were found, setting off an international dragnet and fears about packages yet to be discovered. It also led to a tense scene in which American military jets escorted a plane to Kennedy International Airport amid concerns — which turned out to be unfounded — that there might be explosives on board.

On Saturday, in news conferences in London and Yemen, and from interviews with investigators here and abroad, the contours of the investigation began to emerge, along with new details of the frantic hours leading to the discovery of the packages.

American officials said their operating assumption was that the two bombs were the work of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, Al Qaeda in Yemen's top bomb-maker, whose previous devices have been more rudimentary, and also unsuccessful. Mr. Asiri is believed to have built both the bomb sewn into the underwear of the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight last Dec. 25, and the suicide bomb that nearly killed Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, months earlier. (In the second episode, American officials say, Mr. Asiri hid the explosives in a body cavity of his brother, the suicide bomber.)

Just as in the two previous attacks, the bomb discovered in Dubai contained the explosive PETN, according to the Dubai police and Janet Napolitano , the secretary of homeland security. This new plot, Ms. Napolitano said, had the “hallmarks of Al Qaeda.”

The targets of the bombs remained in question.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said on Saturday that the parcel bomb intercepted in England was designed to explode while the plane was flying. The country's home secretary, Theresa May, said that British investigators had also concluded the device was “viable and could have exploded.”

“The target may have been an aircraft, and had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down,” she said.

But earlier in the day, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee, said that federal authorities indicated to him that the packages were probably intended to blow up the Jewish sites in Chicago rather than the cargo planes, since they do not carry passengers.

Based on a conversation with Ms. Napolitano, he said that authorities were also leaving open the possibility that other packages with explosives had not yet been found. On Saturday, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department 's chief spokesman, said that no specific threats had been made against synagogues or Jewish neighborhoods in the city, but that officers were watching them more closely as a precaution.

It was a call from Mr. bin Nayef, the Saudi intelligence chief, on Thursday evening to John O. Brennan , the White House senior counterterrorism official and former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that set off the search, according to American officials. They said Mr. bin Nayef also notified C.I.A. officials in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia has sometimes been a reluctant ally in America's global campaign against radical militants. But it sees Yemen, its impoverished next door neighbor, as a different matter. The Saudis consider the Qaeda branch in Yemen its biggest security threat and Saudi intelligence has set up both a web of electronic surveillance and spies to penetrate the organization.

Reviewing the evidence, American intelligence officials say they believe that the plot may have been blessed by the highest levels of Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, including Mr. Awlaki.

“We know that Awlaki has taken a very specific interest in plotting against the United States, and we've found that he's usually behind any attempted attack on American targets,” said one official.

Still they cautioned that it was still early to draw any firm conclusions and they did not present proof of Mr. Awlaki's involvement.

This year, the C.I.A. designated Mr. Awlaki — an American citizen — as a high priority for the agency's campaign of targeted killing.

According to one official involved in the investigation, the package that was discovered in Dubai had a woman's name and location in Sana on the return address. The package left Yemen on Thursday, the official said, where it was flown to Doha, Qatar, and on to Dubai.

Also on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable warning that the bombs may have been associated with two schools in Yemen — the Yemen American Institute for Languages-Computer Management, and the American Center for Training and Development.

That connection would echo the attempted bombing last Dec. 25; the Nigerian who was implicated had studied at a different Sana language school before training with Al Qaeda. If language schools are again involved, it opens the possibility that a foreign student or students may have participated in the plot.

Security forces in Yemen were in a state of heightened alert on Saturday, as investigators questioned cargo employees and shut down the FedEx and U.P.S. offices in Sana, the Yemeni capital.

Obama administration officials said they were discussing a range of responses to the thwarted attack. The failed attack on Dec. 25 created an opportunity for the White House to press Yemen's government to take more aggressive action against Qaeda operatives there, and some American officials believe the conditions are similar now.

A thinly veiled campaign of American missile strikes in Yemen this year has achieved mixed results. American officials said that several Qaeda operatives had been killed in the attacks, but there have also been major setbacks, including a strike in May that accidentally killed a deputy governor in a remote province of Yemen. That strike infuriated Yemen's president, Mr. Saleh, and forced a months-long halt in the American military campaign.

In recent months, the Obama administration has been debating whether to escalate its secret offensive against the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The C.I.A. has a fraction of the staff in Yemen that it currently has in Pakistan, where the spy agency is running a covert war in the country's tribal areas, but over the course of the year the C.I.A. has sent more case officers and analysts to Sana as part of a task force with the military's Joint Special Operations Command .

American officials have been considering sending armed drone aircraft to Yemen to replicate the Pakistan campaign, but such a move would almost certainly require the approval of the mercurial Mr. Saleh.

Yemeni officials have declined to comment on details of the plot, saying only that they are investigating. But new checkpoints appeared in the capital on Saturday, with officers checking the identity cards of drivers and pedestrians.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world/31terror.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Army Studies Thrill-Seeking Behavior

WASHINGTON — Senior Airman Michael Kearns had been back from Iraq for only two months when he was pulled over on a Florida highway for going more than 120 miles per hour on his new Suzuki. He knew his motorcycle riding was reckless, but after living through daily mortar attacks on his base in Iraq, he said he needed the adrenaline rush.

“When you get here, there's nothing that's very exciting that keeps your pulse going,” Airman Kearns, 27, said in a recent interview.

His experience is so common that the United States military, alarmed by a rising suicide rate and the record number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who die in highway accidents back home, is asking a provocative new question: Nearly a decade into two bloody wars, are the armed forces attracting recruits drawn to high-risk behavior?

“In January 1990, you could join the military and think, ‘You know, I'm probably not going to get deployed,' ” said Peter D. Feaver , a Duke University professor who has done research on the gap between the military and civilian society. “So on the margins it is reasonable to expect that there might have been a few more people in the pre-9/11 period who said, ‘I have no interest in war and there are other reasons for me to join.'

“By 2005, there were very few, or nobody, like that,” he said. “Or if you were like that, you were a fool. The evidence was staring you in the face that you would be deployed in ground combat.”

The military says the people who enlist to serve their country have always included plenty of adrenaline addicts, which recruiters say is a good thing when troops are needed to jump out of airplanes and go on raids in Afghanistan. But military researchers say they have been compelled to take a deeper look at the psychological demographic of an all-volunteer force during the most prolonged period of combat in American history.

“We've never been at war for as long as we've been, and we don't know the effects of that,” said Bruce Shahbaz, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the three main authors of a recent Army suicide report . “We may be attracting people who are more comfortable with risk, and if so, how do we measure that?”

Beyond that, Colonel Shahbaz said, the Army wants to know whether risk-takers are more likely to commit suicide or die in accidents, and whether a predisposition to risk-taking is increased by combat.

To try to find answers, this fall the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health are beginning a five-year study of 90,000 active-duty soldiers and all new Army recruits, 80,000 to 120,000 per year. The recruits are to answer confidential surveys that Colonel Shahbaz said might include questions on whether they owned motorcycles, used drugs or liked to bungee-jump. There will be cognitive tests to measure reactions to stress as well as an in-depth look at a recruit's family background and genetics.

“It will give us an assessment of someone's cognitive style and whether they have a history that draws them to high-risk behaviors,” said Thomas R. Insel, the institute's director.

Researchers acknowledge that in focusing so much on recruits, they are slighting what many say is the biggest reason for the high military suicide rate, the stress of repeated wartime deployments. But in one of the more surprising statistics cited in the Army's suicide report , 79 percent of the soldiers who committed suicide in recent years had had only one deployment, or had not deployed at all.

“For us to blame this thing just on the war would be wrong,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli , the vice chief of staff of the Army, said at a July news conference about the report.

The report concluded that much of the fault was with commanders who disregarded the mental health problems of their troops, but it also blamed the Army for not winnowing out enough of the recruits with records of substance abuse and crime. From roughly 2005 to 2007, when a strong economy sent potential soldiers looking elsewhere for jobs with better pay, the Army lowered its recruiting and retention standards to meet the demands of two wars. As a result, the report said, tens of thousands of recruits were granted waivers for the kind of behavior, including felonies, that would have kept them out of the service in earlier years.

There were a record 160 active-duty Army suicides in the year from Oct. 1, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2009, and the report said that if accidental deaths were included, “less young men and women die in combat than die by their own actions.”

Whatever the survey finds, the military says it has to do a better job of managing the risk-takers of any kind within its ranks. “A soldier who dies bungee-jumping on a weekend because he needs that adrenaline rush is no less painful to the Army than a soldier who commits suicide,” Colonel Shahbaz said. “If we could figure out three or four of those behaviors that affect a large number of people and say, ‘O.K., a lot of guys are doing this, how can we teach them to do that in a way that is more safe and more responsible?' ”

Some programs are already in place for young men and women who return from war feeling invincible. The military requires riding classes for service members who buy motorcycles, a popular way to spend deployment cash. The Marines hold sport-bike racing events to try to cut down on speeding on the roads. And the Air Force has a new safety program in which young airmen who have been in accidents talk to their peers about their close calls.

One of them is Airman Kearns, the Iraq veteran who was stopped speeding on his motorcycle. This year, working out of Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, he has spoken to at least 300 young members of the Air Force to tell them, “There are other ways to get your adrenaline.”

Before he joined the military, Airman Kearns liked extreme sports, including motorcycle racing and bungee-jumping. He enlisted, he said, to serve his country. But, as he also acknowledged, “I might have been attracted to the risk of it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/31memo.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Violent Turn in Abuse Case More Than 3 Decades Old

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — William Lynch's life has spiraled out of control in the 35 years since he says he and his brother were molested by a Jesuit priest. He struggled with depression, had nightmares and tried to kill himself twice.

The authorities say they believe that the anger and pain erupted last spring when the Rev. Jerold Lindner was lured to the lobby of his Jesuit retirement home and then beat severely in front of shocked witnesses.

Mr. Lynch, 43, was arrested Friday and booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in the May 10 attack. He posted $25,000 bail and will plead not guilty at an arraignment next month, said his lawyer, Pat Harris.

During a confrontation at the Jesuits' Sacred Heart retirement home in Los Gatos, Calif., Mr. Lynch repeatedly punched Father Lindner in the face and body after the priest said he did not recognize him, said Sgt. Rick Sung, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department.

Mr. Lynch and his younger brother settled with the Jesuits of the California Province, a Roman Catholic religious order, for $625,000 in 1998 after accusing Father Lindner of abusing them in 1975 during weekend camping trips in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Mr. Harris said the boys, who were 7 and 5 at the time, were raped and forced to have oral sex with each other while Father Lindner watched.

Father Lindner, 65, has been accused of abuse by nearly a dozen people, including his sister and nieces and nephews.

Investigators connected Mr. Lynch to the attack using phone records, Sergeant Sung said. A half-hour before the episode, a caller identifying himself as Eric called the home and said someone would arrive shortly to inform Father Lindner of a family member's death.

Father Lindner was able to drive himself to the hospital after the attack. He did not return a call left on his answering machine.

He has previously denied abusing the Lynch boys and has not been criminally charged. The abuse falls outside the statute of limitations.

Father Lindner was removed from the ministry and placed at the Los Gatos retirement home in 2001.

He was named in two additional lawsuits for abuse between 1973 and 1985, according to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The cases were included in a $660 million settlement struck between the church and more than 550 plaintiffs in 2007.

The Rev. John McGarry, the provincial, told The Associated Press that Father Lindner had recovered and resumed his work at the retirement home, where he helps care for 75 infirm priests. He is not allowed to leave the home unsupervised, he said.

“As you can imagine, it's very emotionally distressing to go through something like this,” Father McGarry said. “He hasn't spoken a lot about it. He's living a quiet life of prayer and service within our community.”

Mr. Lynch declined an interview on Friday, but in a 2002 article in The Los Angeles Times, he said he had had nightmares for years, had battled depression and alcoholism and had attempted suicide twice.

“Many times I thought of driving down to L.A. and confronting Father Jerry,” Mr. Lynch said. “I wanted to exorcise all of the rage and anger and bitterness he put into me. You can't put into words what this guy did to me. He stole my innocence and destroyed my life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/31priest.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jews in Chicago Feel Safe, but Are Cautious

CHICAGO — Even to a block that is arguably one of the safest and most secure in the country, the news that two parcels containing explosives were shipped from Yemen and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in the city gave some residents pause on Saturday.

“I'm not terribly worried — I heard on the 5 o'clock news that we weren't one of the synagogues targeted,” said Alan Berger, a Hyde Park resident, as he arrived for services at KAM Isaiah Israel, a Reform congregation where he serves as secretary.

“But the president does live across the street,” said Mr. Berger's wife, Paula. “You never know if some crazy will attempt to blow up the people in the synagogue.”

Reports that Chicago-area synagogues or Jewish community centers were likely targets of a terrorist attack and the return of President Obama to his hometown this weekend brought attention to the city's security. But except for having to negotiate an extra layer of the already tight security in the neighborhood, the mood was calm among the dozen members of KAM Isaiah Israel, directly across the street from Mr. Obama's home in Hyde Park/Kenwood, as prayer services wrapped up Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Berger, 70, said he has planned taking extra time to reach the synagogue since Mr. Obama's election, when the route came under regular surveillance by Chicago police officers and Secret Service agents, who usually stop cars and pedestrians entering the area.

On Saturday afternoon, more than nine Chicago police cars joined half a dozen Secret Service vehicles stationed between Ellis and Greenwood Avenues. The streets around Mr. Obama's house have been blocked off to pedestrian and car traffic other than residents since his election, and security is routinely stepped up when he is in town for an overnight stay. The president returned for a rally in Hyde Park Saturday evening, his first here since his Election Night celebration in 2008.

“This is probably the safest place in the country to be today,” said Michael Rothschild, who was touring the neighborhood with his wife, Judith, on Saturday morning. “Having Obama's house right by the synagogue, the odds of this one being bombed are much less because it is so fortified already.”

Though federal investigators have not publicly identified the two synagogues that were targets, religious leaders and the local media have speculated that they were in Lakeview and Rogers Park, both neighborhoods on the city's far North Side. The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that KAM Isaiah Israel was not a target.

Mr. Rothschild, a professor of business at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has researched the likelihood of terrorist attacks on the United States, said the probability of an attack was still too low to deter him from visiting the president's neighborhood. “People tend to overweight unusual events and underweight the things that are ordinary,” he said.

The Chicago Police Department said in a news release on Friday that it was working with the Department of Homeland Security , the F.B.I. and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to protect the city and its residents. The police declined repeated requests for further comment by e-mail and phone Saturday afternoon.

“The Secret Service is paying close attention to information we receive from the intelligence community at the local, state and national level,” said Ed Donovan, an agency spokesman. He would not comment on how the agency planned to maintain security in Chicago during the president's visit.

Andrea Maremont, 68, a North Side resident and member of Temple Sholom in Lakeview, said the threat did not worry her, despite her synagogue's prominence and location near a lakefront highway. She said it was assumed that her synagogue was a target, “and we know we have to be on the alert. We just have to go about our business.”

Rabbi Batsheva Appel of KAM Isaiah Israel echoed the cautious optimism of other members of the city's Jewish community as she mingled with worshipers after services Saturday.

“We do have a level of anxiety,” she said. “The news of packages destined for Chicago synagogues is very sad, but there is not much we can do except be careful.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/31chicago.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OPINION

The 150-Year War

MY attic office is walled with books on Lincoln and Lee, slavery and secession. John Brown glares from a daguerreotype on my desk. The Civil War is my sanctum — except when my 7-year-old races in to get at the costume box. Invariably, he tosses aside the kepi and wooden sword to reach for a wizard cloak or Star Wars light saber.

I was born in a different era, the late 1950s, when the last Union drummer boy had only just died and plastic blue-and-gray soldiers were popular toys. In the 1960s, the Civil War centennial recalled great battles as protesters marched for civil rights and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial , “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”

Today the Civil War echoes at a different register, usually in fights over remembrance. Though Southern leaders in the 1860s called slavery the cornerstone of their cause, some of their successors are intent on scrubbing that legacy from memory. Earlier this year in Virginia, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell proclaimed April to be Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery, while the state's Department of Education issued a textbook peddling the fiction that thousands of blacks had fought for the South. Skirmishes erupt at regular intervals over flags and other emblems, like “Colonel Reb,” whom Ole Miss recently surrendered as its mascot. The 1860s also have a particular resonance at election time, as the country splits along political and cultural lines that still separate white Southern voters from balloters in blue Union states.

But as we approach the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's election, on Nov. 6, and the long conflict that followed, it's worth recalling other reasons that era endures. The Civil War isn't just an adjunct to current events. It's a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Those famous lines come from President Lincoln, delivered not in the Gettysburg Address, but on a routine occasion: his second annual message to Congress. Can you recall a single line from any of the teleprompted State of the Union messages in your own lifetime?

The Civil War abounded in eloquence, from the likes of Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, the Southern diarist Mary Chesnut and warriors who spoke the way they fought. Consider the Southern cavalryman J. E. B. Stuart, with panache, saying of his father-in-law's loyalty to the Union: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continually.” Or Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, brutal and terse, warning besieged Atlantans: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

These and other words from the war convey a bracing candor and individuality, traits Americans reflexively extol while rarely exhibiting. Today's lusterless brass would never declare, as Sherman did, “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!” or say of a superior, as Sherman did of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.”

You can hear the same, bold voice in the writing of common soldiers, their letters unmuzzled by military censors and their dialect not yet homogenized by television and Interstates. “Got to see the elephant at last,” an Indianan wrote of his first, inglorious combat. “I don't care about seeing him very often any more, for if there was any fun in such work I couldn't see it ... It is not the thing it is bragged up to be.” Another soldier called the Gettysburg campaign “nothing but fighting, starving, marching and cussing.” Cowards were known as “skedaddlers,” “tree dodgers,” “skulkers” and “croakers.”

There's character even in muster rolls and other records, which constantly confound the stereotype of a war between brotherly white farm boys North and South. You find Rebel Choctaws and Union Kickapoos; Confederate rabbis and Arab camel-drivers; Californians in gray and Alabamans in blue; and in wondrous Louisiana, units called the Corps d'Afrique, the Creole Rebels, the Slavonian Rifles and the European Brigade. By war's end, black troops constituted over 10 percent of the Union Army and Navy. The roster of black sailors included men born in Zanzibar and Borneo.

Then there are the individuals who defy classification, like this one from a Pennsylvania muster roll: “Sgt. Frank Mayne; deserted Aug. 24, 1862; subsequently killed in battle in another regiment, and discovered to be a woman; real name, Frances Day.”

If the words of the 1860s speak to the era's particularity, the bleakly riveting data of the Civil War communicates its scale and horror — a portent of the industrial slaughter to come in the 20th century. Roughly 75 percent of eligible Southern men and more than 60 percent of eligible Northerners served, compared with a tiny fraction today, and more than one million were killed or wounded. Fighting in close formation, some regiments lost 80 percent of their men in a single battle. Three days at Gettysburg killed and wounded more Americans than nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have. Nearly one in three Confederate soldiers died — a statistic that helps to explain the deep sense of loss that lasted in the South for over a century. In all, the death rate from combat and disease was so high that a comparable war today would claim six million American lives.

As horrific as these numbers are, they're made graphic by the pioneering photography of the Civil War. It's hard for us to conjure the Minutemen of 1775, but we can look into the eyes of Union and Confederate recruits, study their poses, see emotion in their faces. They look lean (and they were: on average, Civil War soldiers were 40 pounds lighter than young men today), but their faces are strikingly modern and jaunty.

Then we see them again, strewn promiscuously across fields, limbs bloated, mouths frozen in ghastly O's. When Mathew Brady first exhibited photographs of battlefield dead in 1862, The Times likened viewing them to seeing “a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote that photographs forced civilians to confront the true face of battle — “a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing.” We're spared this discomfort today, with the American dead from two ground wars carefully airbrushed from public view.

There's another great difference between the Civil War and every other war in our history: the ground itself, a vast and accessible Yosemite of memory that stretches across the South and to points beyond, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to New Mexico's Glorieta Pass. True, much of the Civil War's landscape has been interred beneath big-box malls and subdivisions named for the history they've obliterated. But at national parks like Shiloh and Antietam you can still catch a whisper of a human-scaled America, where soldiers took cover in high corn and sunken roads, and Lincoln's earthy imagery spoke to the lives of his countrymen.

In an electronics-saturated age, battlefield parks also force us to exercise our atrophied imaginations. There's no Sensurround or 3D technology, just snake-rail fences, marble men and silent cannons aimed at nothing. You have to read, listen, let your mind go. If you do, you may experience what Civil War re-enactors call a “period rush” — the momentary high of leaving your own time zone for the 1860s.

You wouldn't want to stay there; at least I wouldn't. Nor is battle the only way into the Civil War. There are countless other portals, and scholars are opening them to reveal lesser-known aspects of Civil War society and memory. Know about the 11-year-old girl who convinced Lincoln to grow a beard? The Richmond women who armed themselves and looted stores, crying, “Bread or blood”? The “Mammy Monument” that almost went up in Washington a year after the Lincoln Memorial?

It's a bottomless treasure, this Civil War, much of it encrusted in myth or still unexplored. Which is why, a century and a half later, it still claims our attention and remembrance.

Tony Horwitz is the author of “Confederates in the Attic” and the forthcoming “Midnight Rising: John Brown's Raid and the Start of the Civil War.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31Horwitz.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EDITORIAL

Virtual Failure on the Border

It is past time to pull the plug on the “virtual fence” that the federal government has been trying to erect on the border with Mexico. The Secure Border Initiative Network — a series of towers with radar and cameras that is supposed to spot trespassers along most of the 2,000 miles of border — is a costly failure.

The $7.6 billion project (that was the original estimate) was championed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and initially embraced by President Obama.

The supposedly whiz-bang technology was plagued from the start by software bugs. Sensors and alarms were stymied by tumbleweeds and high winds. The cost kept rising and the delivery date kept slipping. Four years after being introduced — and with more than $1 billion already spent — barely 50 miles of the border has been covered.

This year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano halted new work on SBInet and diverted $50 million of its funding to other uses. She should kill it once and for all when the contract with its prime contractor, Boeing, ends next month.

The job of laying an electronic net over 2,000 miles was never going to be easy. Reports from the Government Accountability Office describe a meltdown by both government and industry.

Deadlines on deployment kept slipping, by years. The G.A.O. also said it was “unclear and uncertain what technology capabilities were to be delivered when.” It criticized Boeing for giving “incomplete and anomalous” evaluation data, leaving Homeland Security unable to hold the company to standards for controlling costs and meeting deadlines.

The “virtual fence” was a misbegotten idea from the start, based on the faulty premise that controlling immigration is as simple as closing the border — and that closing the border is a simple matter of more sensors, more fencing and more boots on the ground. So long as there is a demand for cheap labor, a hunger for better jobs here, and almost no legal way to get in, people will keep finding ways around any fence, virtual or not.

Border security cannot work unless it is accompanied by a real effort at comprehensive immigration reform. There is no getting back the $1 billion already wasted. We can avoid squandering billions more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31sun3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the Chicago Sun Times

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edgewater synagogue serving LGBT Jews was terror target

October 31, 2010

BY MARY WISNIEWSKI

A small, progressive synagogue in Edgewater that serves gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews said Saturday it had learned that it was one of the targets of the foiled mail bombs plot.

"We are somewhat alarmed and somewhat disturbed," said Lilli Kornblum, co-president of Or Chadash, a North Side congregation of about 100 members.

Or Chadash shares space with Emanuel Congregation at a synagogue on North Sheridan Road. Emanuel's rabbi said Saturday that he had been informed that more than two synagogues were targeted.

Rabbi Michael Zedek said he was told by a person of "considerable importance and reliability in the larger and Jewish community that there were four synagogues targeted, not two."

"He wanted to be assured that our security plan was in place," Zedek said of his source. "He told me, 'I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is Emanuel Congregation was not part of the four. The bad news is Or Chadash is.' "

However, Zedek also learned Saturday that his synagogue's website had been repeatedly visited recently by someone from Egypt -- a fact that concerned him enough to report it to law enforcement authorities.

"What I was told this morning by the person who keeps our website current is that when she was checking to see how many hits we'd been getting recently, and this is before what occurred on Friday, to her surprise we had 83 hits from an address in Cairo, Egypt," Zedek said. "It does assume a greater interest in light of what happened.''

As far as the foiled bomb plot, Zedek did not know which other Jewish institutions were targeted.

A federal source told the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday that at least one Jewish Community Center also was targeted. The JCC has seven community centers in the area, including in Lake View, Hyde Park and Rogers Park, but JCC representatives could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Kornblum said the news that her congregation was targeted has been followed by heightened police presence at the synagogue.

"We're very, very small, which is why we're surprised we would draw anyone's attention," she said. But she said it appeared that the plot was intended as a widespread attack against Chicago's Jewish community.

"We are taking it very seriously. But to be quite frank, for most of us it's not that different than a regular day in terms of going about our security, because we're always on a heightened sense of alert," Kornblum said.

Meanwhile, Mayor Daley said Saturday that Chicago Police are working with state and federal authorities to provide extra security to the city's Jewish organizations.

Asked Saturday why he thought Chicago had been targeted in the plot, Daley said, "We don't know yet. . . . No one knows why. That's what they have to figure out."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2851308,CST-NWS-terror31.article

.