From the Los Angeles Times

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Holiday anti-terrorism focus is on 'soft targets'

Recent arrests have officials worried about threats to trains, malls and public gatherings.

by Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau

December 30, 2010

Reporting from Washington

After arrests in Europe and sting operations in the U.S., intelligence agencies have been on edge this holiday season over concerns that terrorist organizations are setting their sights on easier-to-hit targets such as subways, trains and large public gatherings.

Federal and local authorities have responded with demonstrations of force and high-profile arrests to deter would-be plotters.

More bomb-sniffing dogs checked passengers on Amtrak train platforms. Security bulletins told local police to be on guard for attacks against sporting events, parades and religious activities. Authorities in Washington randomly checked subway riders' bags for explosives in the days before Christmas, and some officers carried assault rifles as they patrolled Metro stations.

The "enhanced measures" were a response to a heightened threat against trains, subways and buses, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the day after Christmas. Napolitano also said the agency in the last year had reached out and provided training to counter threats against "so-called soft targets — the hotels, shopping malls, for example."

The FBI also has brought charges in three undercover sting operations in the last three months. Authorities said suspects in Washington, Baltimore and Portland, Ore., attempted to collect explosives to bomb public places from people they thought were co-conspirators, only to be nabbed by undercover agents who had posed as domestic terrorists.

Authorities said the bomb plots were evidence that terrorists were changing their game plans.

Pressure from U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and financial sanctions on Al Qaeda have "made it much more difficult for them to plan spectacular attacks," said Rick Nelson, director of the homeland security and counter-terrorism program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"They are trying to expand their repertoire," Nelson said, to attacks that are "a lot less sophisticated but easier to execute."

On Wednesday, three men were arrested in Denmark for allegedly plotting to kill as many people as possible in the offices of a Copenhagen newspaper in retribution for the publication of a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad in 2006.

Al Qaeda in Yemen has gone public in encouraging American citizens to attack their own country, recruiting potential bombers through Internet video speeches by American-born cleric Anwar Awlaki and the publication of three issues of a slick English-language propaganda magazine called Inspire.

The online magazine discourages American Muslims from taking trips to training camps in Pakistan or Somalia that might land them in U.S. intelligence databases. Instead, articles encourage recruits to plan and launch attacks on American soil and offer examples of how to do it, such as using homemade bombs, ramming a truck into a crowd or shooting into a busy Washington restaurant.

The approach may seem hapless on the surface, but it can't be ignored, said Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security's first assistant secretary for policy and the author of "Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism."

The organizers of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen know that even a failed attack such as the foiled package bomb plot in October will scare Americans and bring more attention to their cause, Baker said.

"They are not haunted by the need to do something as spectacular as 9/11," Baker said. "They seem completely unfazed by failure or looking stupid."

Soft targets aren't new targets, said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, but the success of the 2008 attacks on a posh hotel and other sites in Mumbai, India, gave militants new incentive to look at hitting things other than airplanes.

"The fact is, our surface transportation is not as secure as our air transportation," said Cilluffo, who added that random searches, increased police presence and bomb-sniffing dogs can go a long way toward deterring attacks. "But all of this is predicated on good intelligence. Good intelligence is the lifeblood. As much as we can invest in that environment is money well spent."

To encourage citizens to point out suspicious behavior, Napolitano has promoted a national initiative using the slogan, "See something, say something." Announcements can be heard on trains in Washington and even in Walmart stores across the country.

To collect and share information on tips, the Department of Homeland Security has helped fund and train staffs at 72 state and regional "fusion centers," where law enforcement officials with top-secret clearances can read high-level intelligence and analyze reports of suspicious activity from local authorities.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-security-season-20101231,0,7943812.story

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DNA links killer to 1974 slaying of Pomona woman

Cold case detectives say a man who died seven years ago while awaiting execution at San Quentin for murdering a 10-year-old girl is tied to the strangulation of a 29-year-old developmentally disabled woman.

by Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

December 31, 2010

When Robert Edward Stansbury died seven years ago while awaiting execution on San Quentin's death row, some worried that he would take the full extent of his crimes to his grave.

Stansbury, an ice cream truck driver, was serving time for raping and killing a 10-year-old girl. He had a long record of sexual assaults, at least once using his ice cream truck as a ruse. Detectives long suspected there were more victims but could not prove it.

This week, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department detectives announced that they have DNA evidence linking Stansbury to a decades-old cold case in Pomona.

Detectives said DNA taken from Stansbury after an unrelated felony conviction was matched to evidence collected in the 1974 slaying of Barbara Hall, a 29-year-old developmentally disabled woman who was strangled near a Claremont horse trail.

Investigators believe the Pomona woman was waiting for a bus home from a continuation school where she worked caring for infants. The day of her disappearance, there was a bus strike — which Hall apparently didn't know when she arrived at her bus stop.

She was never seen alive again.

A day later, her body was discovered. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Stansbury had a history of abducting and sexually assaulting victims.

In 1982, he lured Robyn Leigh Jackson, 10, into his truck with the promise of free ice cream and candy. He raped and beat the girl before stuffing her into his ice cream cooler. She died the next day after he dumped her into a Pasadena flood control channel.

Before that, he had been convicted of other sexual assaults dating to 1959, authorities said.

"This guy should never have been on the street," said sheriff's Sgt. Richard Longshore. "Just a predator, just dangerous."

Stansbury covered much of the San Gabriel Valley and unincorporated areas of East Los Angeles in his ice cream truck. Detectives believe there still may be other victims, and are seeking the public's help.

"This guy was causing some serious damage wherever he went," said sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker. "We would not be surprised if someone saw this news story … that somebody's going to have a very bad memory about this guy and put two and two together."

Authorities said Hall's body showed no defensive injuries, even though she was known to be distrustful of strangers, a combination that has led Longshore to believe she may have been forced to come with Stansbury at gunpoint.

Her body was found just a day later on a trail in the area bordering San Dimas and Claremont. Hall's case was recently reopened by cold case detectives, who used DNA technology not available at the time of the initial investigation. Old evidence slides were located at the Los Angeles County coroner's office that crime lab technicians were able to match to Stansbury's DNA sample.

The response from Hall's two surviving sisters was emotional, Longshore said.

"I told them there's really not going to be any closure," he said. "But at least I'll give them some answers."

Stansbury died at San Quentin State Prison at the age of 60. He made headlines for a lengthy court battle he had undertaken arguing that his Miranda rights had been infringed in that case. Authorities believe it is "likely" he had other victims, particularly between 1974 and 1982.

Anyone with information is asked to call detectives at (323) 890-5000 .

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cold-case-20101231,0,7683634.story

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Mexican exiles in El Paso can see their pasts across the river

They come from Ciudad Juarez, fleeing the drug violence that has claimed 3,000 lives this year. But their new lives, though far safer, are marked by loneliness, hardship and psychological torment.

by Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

December 31, 2010

Reporting from El Paso

They go about their lives here, trying to begin anew. They want to forget about the clean-shaven assassins, the sound of gunfire, the graves and the homes they've left behind in Ciudad Juarez.

A 41-year-old mother of three sees a Juarez neighbor shopping in the discount stores of downtown El Paso. She looks for a place to hide.

A year earlier, she'd been shot through the neck, rushed to a hospital in Juarez and then a second one in El Paso. She had never gone back to her Juarez home.

"All the neighbors think I'm dead," she said, asking that her name not be published. She would prefer for the time being that they continue to think so.

Escapes to El Paso from Juarez and its drug wars are filled with such moments. There is safety, yes, but also loneliness, hardship and the psychological torment that comes with living within walking distance of a place to which you cannot return.

Juarez and El Paso are twin cities connected by bridges over the Rio Grande. For much of their history, the locals have thought of them as a single metropolis — until 1888, they even shared the same name. But today El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States; Juarez has seen more killings than Baghdad, more than 3,000 homicides so far this year.

Brenda Ramirez, a 28-year-old mom, saw the man who ran a neighborhood store in Juarez when she was headed to an El Paso church one Sunday.

He hugged her and joked with her the way he used to with Raul, her 7-year-old son, who was killed by gunmen last year. For a fleeting moment some of the good memories of Juarez came flooding back.

Sometimes, in her El Paso exile, Ramirez captures and holds on to those good Juarez memories and it's as if Raul had never been shot and killed alongside his father, her ex-husband, as he drove Raul back to her house. As if Brenda had never had to leave.

"My son loved being with his cousins," she said. "On Saturday and Sunday, they'd all play soccer. My house was always filled with children. I'd give them all food and have them all with me, playing their games."

It was just a year ago, just a few miles away, but it was another world.

Now Ramirez lives with her 2-year-old son and husband in a two-room converted garage in an El Paso barrio of auto shops and taquerias. The front door faces an alley. She doesn't know any neighbors. No one stops by to visit.

"Everyone is gone working all day," she said of her neighbors. "It is very quiet here."

On the wall and in boxes and albums she keeps pictures of her late son. Playing soccer. Dressed as an angel for a school Nativity play. In Juarez.

* * *

For years, the rich of Juarez have retreated to the United States for a kind of gilded, voluntary second life. Some have second homes on the El Paso side where they sleep at night. Their children go to school in the U.S. too. But they still keep businesses and property in Juarez. And they go back and forth as they like.

In Juarez now, the rich are shuttled around in armor-plated vehicles. Soldiers behind sandbags guard office buildings. Few go out at night. And thousands of ordinary working people are fleeing — some on valid tourist visas, some not.

Hundreds have applied for political asylum, which means they cannot return to Juarez for a day or even a minute. A return home voids an asylum application and risks deportation.

"You can't go back to go to your father's funeral, or to have a couple of beers, or to see the Indios play," Carlos Spector, an El Paso attorney, said, referring to the Juarez soccer team. "You're not going back at all. You're going to be stuck here."

In El Paso, people leave their front doors unlocked. For many, the absence of fear takes getting used to.

Alejandro Hernandez, a 41-year-old father of two, remembers his first week in El Paso in July: "I went to Walmart at three or four in the morning. And there were people there, shopping." He stood on the store's white floors, gleaming under fluorescent lights — all that American normality felt impossibly surreal.

In Juarez, you have to be alert to the movement on the streets, to the slow-moving cars and the paid street-corner lookouts.

In El Paso, you're more likely to be ambushed by your fears.

Hernandez learned this when he got to El Paso, after five horrific days in the hands of a band of marijuana-smoking, drug-cartel hit men. He was a TV news cameraman, kidnapped on the job by a cartel that wanted to force his bosses to broadcast a message.

The kidnappers beat him, then threw him in a room. At one point, he said, he managed to lift the blindfold over his eyes: "All the walls and the floors were covered with blood." When they suddenly let him go, he took his family and raced for the border.

They moved in with an El Paso relative. His children started school. All seemed normal. Then one day, as he stood outside his lawyer's office downtown, a pickup truck made a U-turn in front of him. "I ducked down behind a car," he said.

It was only after the pickup disappeared, after he caught his breath, that he realized no one was after him.

Fear, loss and death can color the smallest details of daily life.

Ricardo Chavez Aldaña, a onetime customs inspector and radio reporter, drives around El Paso in an old Buick with Chihuahua license plates that used to belong to his teenage nephew Luis.

It's the car Chavez used to flee Mexico with his wife and five kids, and since he can't work in the U.S. while his political asylum application is processed, he can't afford a new one.

"This car is in bad shape, look how dirty it is," he said as he drove around El Paso. "My nephew kept it so clean."

Luis, 17, his brother and two other teenagers were murdered at a friend's party in 2009 in one of the home-invasion massacres Juarez is becoming famous for, symptoms of a lawlessness so widespread it can strike anyone, anytime. No one has been charged, and no official theories offered.

On the day Luis was killed, he and his uncle had spent hours trying to get the car to start so Luis could go to that party. "How many times since have I wished we didn't get this thing started," Chavez said.

Chavez was then a newly hired reporter at a radio station. He went on the air to denounce the authorities for protecting assassins ravaging the city. Within hours, someone called his home threatening "a massacre" if he kept talking.

His family of seven is now squeezed into two rooms in El Paso, sharing a home with relatives. Tensions are high. His 14-year-old son, especially, is having trouble with their isolated American existence.

"I feel like we're being driven apart," Chavez said of his family. "I don't know if it's because we're crazy because of what's happened to us, or because we're all shut up in here."

Mexico is visible on the near horizon. He sees the 320-foot flagpole just across the border when he walks to the corner store to buy bread and cereal in the morning.

"This store has everything I liked in Juarez, except for one thing," Chavez said. "It doesn't have the kind of chocolate cereal I like."

Chavez could hop on a bike, pedal south and be at a store that sells that cereal in 10 minutes — but he'd be risking his life to do so.

Sometimes he takes a short drive to the hillside neighborhoods that rise over downtown El Paso. When he was a kid, he'd go trick-or-treating there — back then, the Border Patrol looked the other way as Juarez kids in Halloween costumes crossed the river.

From the scenic overlook at Murchison Park, feeding quarters into the binoculars, Chavez can see Colonia Obrera, the neighborhood where he lived 34 of his 36 years. It's in a patch of Ciudad Juarez visible between two El Paso glass office towers.

"I can see the gas station where I used to stop," he said. And his church. And a little shopping center. "I feel sick seeing all that," he said.

The exiles also can see the Juarez violence play out daily on their televisions. They can buy the Juarez newspapers and read the grisly details of bodies decapitated or dumped on the street with notes left by their killers. And they can hear the Radio Cañon daily body count recited on their AM radios:

"It's 11 o'clock and we can open the scoreboard, with the first killing of the day…."

* * *

The 41-year-old mother who was shot through the neck entered El Paso on a tourist visa that's since expired. She sees Border Patrol agents in El Paso, and they make her afraid to go outside.

When her husband goes off to work now at El Paso construction sites, she stays inside the little apartment provided by a refugee assistance agency. In the living room is a four-foot-tall Christmas tree. On the walls are the drawings of the couple's 11-year-old daughter.

But Juarez and its demons live in the apartment too.

In Juarez, one of the gunmen who ambushed their home pointed a gun at the young girl's head. They shot her mother four times. Her father still has photos on his cellphone of her neck wound, before it healed.

The gunmen spared the girl, but killed her uncle and another relative. The family has no answers as to why — only that their house looked like all the others on the block.

Forced to leave their old homes, the transplants still pine for them, despite the dark memories they contain.

"My country is always with me and what's happening to it makes me want to weep," said Emilio Gutierrez Soto, 47, a writer. He remembers the garden, the mesquite tree and the friendships he left behind. "That's all over now," he said.

In the kitchen of his small, rented home, Gutierrez labors over pots of stringed beef, making burritos to sell. The walls are covered with mementos from his old life as a reporter for a Juarez paper, a job he was forced to leave after reporting on military links to organized crime.

Once Gutierrez earned his living with his words. Now he uses pots and pans — and his muscles, cleaning up brush at a local farm.

Even for those who can cross the border freely, going back home is not easy.

Brenda Ramirez has a U.S. visa and can travel to Juarez. But the one time she did since her son's death and her flight to El Paso, she stayed just long enough to know there was no going back.

She returned to Colonia Angeles on a mission suggested by her psychotherapist — to retrieve a few of her late 7-year-old's belongings and part with others for good. But as she entered her old home, she said, none of her old neighbors approached her: "They look at you strange. They look the other way. Maybe they think if they talk to us, something bad will happen to them too."

In El Paso, she tries to be strong for Omar, her 2-year-old, and to "honor" Raul's memory.

The routines of life with a toddler help her get through each day. So does the solitude of exile."You don't live with your neighbors here," she said, using a Spanish verb, convivir , that's not easily translated. "Maybe that helps, I don't know. People don't know my life. They don't know what happened."

In the anonymity of El Paso, there is the beginning of a new life. Ramirez takes Omar to a park where he imitates the sounds of the ducks. "Cua, cua, cua." No one stares. No one looks away. At the park, she is not a victim. She is just another mom.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-elpaso-20101231,0,4886229.story

From the New York Times

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Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains

WAUTOMA, Wis. — Life changed for Shawn Eisch with a phone call last January. His youngest brother, Brian, a soldier and single father, had just received orders to deploy from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Afghanistan and was mulling who might take his two boys for a year. Shawn volunteered.

So began a season of adjustments as the boys came to live in their uncle's home here. Joey, the 8-year-old, got into fistfights at his new school. His 12-year-old brother, Isaac, rebelled against their uncle's rules. And Shawn's three children quietly resented sharing a bedroom, the family computer and, most of all, their parents' attention with their younger cousins.

The once comfortable Eisch farmhouse suddenly felt crowded.

“It was a lot more traumatic than I ever pictured it, for them,” Shawn, 44, said. “And it was for me, too.”

The work of war is very much a family affair. Nearly 6 in 10 of the troops deployed today are married, and nearly half have children. Those families — more than a million of them since 2001 — have borne the brunt of the psychological and emotional strain of deployments.

Siblings and grandparents have become surrogate parents. Spouses have struggled with loneliness and stress. Children have felt confused and abandoned during the long separations. All have felt anxieties about the distant dangers of war.

Christina Narewski, 26, thought her husband's second deployment might be easier for her than his first. But she awoke one night this summer feeling so anxious about his absence that she thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. And she still jumps when the doorbell rings, worried it will be officers bearing unwanted news.

“You're afraid to answer your door,” she said.

Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families — effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives.

They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.

And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely the children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.

But those studies do not describe the myriad ways, often imperceptible to outsiders, in which families cope with deployments every day.

For Ms. Narewski, a mother of three, it has meant taking a grocery store job to distract her from thinking about her husband, a staff sergeant with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, now in northern Afghanistan.

For Tim Sullivan, it has meant learning how to potty train, braid hair and fix dinner for his two young children while his wife, a sergeant in a support battalion to the 1-87, is deployed.

For young Joey Eisch, it meant crying himself to sleep for days after his father, a platoon sergeant with the battalion, left last spring. His older brother, Isaac, calm on the outside, was nervous on the inside.

“It's pretty hard worrying if he'll come back safe,” Isaac said. “I think about it like 10 or more times a day.”

Joining the Army Life

Soon after Christina and Francisco Narewski married in 2004, he applied for a job with the local sheriff's office in Salinas, Calif. But he got tired of waiting and, after talking things over with Christina, enlisted in the Army instead.

“We both signed up for it,” Ms. Narewski said. “We knew deployments were going to come.”

That day arrived in the fall of 2007, when their third child was just 5 months old. Ms. Narewski missed Francisco dearly and sometimes cried just hearing his voice when he called from Iraq. But when he returned home in October 2008, it took them weeks to feel comfortable together again, she recalled.

“It's almost like you've forgotten how to be with each other,” she said. “He's been living in his spot for 15 months. Me and the kids have our own routine. It's hard to get back to, ‘Oh, you're home.' ”

Last April, he left again, this time to Afghanistan. Ms. Narewski, who lives in Watertown, N.Y., thought she was prepared. Her mother came to live with them. She signed up for exercise classes to fill the hours. She and Francisco bought BlackBerrys with instant messaging service so they could communicate daily. And yet.

“I've never missed him as much as I do right now,” she said recently. “It doesn't feel like we're moving. It's like you're in a dream and you're trying to get something and you can't get it.”

Not all the spouses back home are women. Tim Sullivan's days have revolved almost entirely around his two children, Austin, 4, and Leah, 2, since his wife, Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, deployed to Afghanistan in March.

He rises each weekday at 5:30 a.m. to dress and feed them before shuttling them to day care. Evenings are the reverse, usually ending with him dozing off in front of the television at their rented ranch-style house in Fayetteville, N.C.

He has moved twice and changed jobs three times in recent years to accommodate his wife's military career. But he does not mind being home with the children, he says, because his father was not, having left the family when Mr. Sullivan was young.

“I'm not going to put my kids through that,” said Mr. Sullivan, 35, who handles child support cases for the county. “I'm going to be there.”

He worries about lost intimacy with his wife, saying that they have had a number of arguments by phone, usually about bill paying or child rearing. “She tells me: ‘Tim, you can't just be Daddy, the hard person. You have to be Mommy, too,'” he said. “I tell her it's not that easy.”

Yet he says that if she stays in the Army — as she has said she wants to do — he is prepared to move again or even endure another deployment. “I love her,” he said. “I'm already signed up. I made a decision to join the life that goes with that.”

Doing What Uncle Sam Asks

Isaac and Joey Eisch have also had to adjust to their father's nomadic life. “I don't try to get too attached to my friends because I move around a lot,” said Isaac, who has lived in five states and Germany with his father. (Joey has lived in three states.) “When I leave, it's like, hard.”

When Sergeant Eisch got divorced in 2004, he took Isaac to an Army post in Germany while Joey stayed with his mother in Wisconsin. Soon after returning to the States in 2007, the sergeant became worried that his ex-wife was neglecting Joey. He petitioned family court for full custody of both boys and won.

In 2009, he transferred to Fort Drum and took the boys with him. Within months, he received orders for Afghanistan.

After nearly 17 years in the Army with no combat deployments, Sergeant Eisch, 36, was determined to go to war. The boys, he felt, were old enough to handle his leaving. Little did he know how hard it would be.

When Shawn put the boys in his truck at Fort Drum to take them to Wautoma, a two-stoplight town in central Wisconsin, Isaac clawed at the rear window “like a caged animal,” Sergeant Eisch said. He still tears up at the recollection.

“I question myself every day if I'm doing the right thing for my kids,” he said. “I'm trying to do my duty to my country and deploy, and do what Uncle Sam asks me to do. But what's everybody asking my boys to do?”

Within a few weeks of arriving at his uncle's home, Joey beat up a boy so badly that the school summoned the police. It was not the last time Shawn and his wife, Lisa, would be summoned to the principal's office.

The boys were in pain, Shawn realized. “There was a lot more emotion,” he said, “than Lisa and I ever expected.”

Shawn, a state water conservation officer, decided he needed to set strict rules for homework and behavior. Violations led to chores, typically stacking wood. But there were carrots, too: for Joey, promises of going to Build-a-Bear if he obeyed his teachers; for Isaac, going hunting with his uncle was the prize. Gradually, the calls from the principal declined, though they have not ended.

In September, Sergeant Eisch returned for midtour leave and the homecoming was as joyful as his departure had been wrenching. Father and sons spent the first nights in hotels, visited an amusement park, went fishing and traveled to New York City, where they saw Times Square and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

But the two weeks were over in what seemed like hours. In his final days, Sergeant Eisch had prepped the boys for his departure, but that did not make it any easier.

“Why can't we just, like, end the war?” Isaac asked at one point.

As they waited at the airport, father and sons clung to each other. “I'm going to have to drink like a gallon of water to replenish these tears,” the sergeant said. “Be safe,” Isaac implored him over and over.

Sergeant Eisch said he would, and then was gone.

Despite his worries, Isaac tried to reassure himself. “He's halfway through, and he's going to make it,” he said. “With all that training he's probably not going to get shot. He knows if there's a red dot on his chest, run. Not toward the enemy. Run, and shoot.”

But his father did not run.

Dad Comes Home

Just weeks after returning to Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch, the senior noncommissioned officer for a reconnaissance and sniper platoon, was involved with Afghan police officers in a major offensive into a Taliban stronghold south of Kunduz city.

While directing fire from his armored truck, Sergeant Eisch saw a rocket-propelled grenade explode among a group of police officers standing in a field. The Afghans scattered, leaving behind a man writhing in pain. Sergeant Eisch ordered his medic to move their truck alongside the officer to shield him from gunfire. Then Sergeant Eisch got out.

“I just reacted,” he recalled. “I seen a guy hurt and nobody was helping him, so I went out there.”

The police officer was bleeding from several gaping wounds and seemed to have lost an eye. Sergeant Eisch started applying tourniquets when he heard the snap of bullets and felt “a chainsaw ripping through my legs.” He had been hit by machine gun fire, twice in the left leg, once in the right.

He crawled back into his truck and helped tighten tourniquets on his own legs. He was evacuated by helicopter and taken to a military hospital where, in a morphine daze, he called Shawn.

“Are you sitting down?” Brian asked woozily. “I've been shot.”

Shawn hung up and went into a quiet panic. He could not tell how badly Brian had been wounded. Would he lose his leg? He called the school and asked them to shield the boys from the news until he could get there.

Outside school, Shawn told Isaac, Joey and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, about Brian's injury. Only Isaac stayed relatively calm.

But later, Shawn found Isaac in his bedroom weeping quietly while looking at a photograph showing his father outside his tent, holding a rifle. Shawn helped him turn the photograph into a PowerPoint presentation titled, “I Love You Dad!”

For Shawn, a gentle and reserved man, his brother's injury brought six months of family turmoil to a new level. Sensing his distress, Lisa urged him to go hunting, a favorite pastime. So he grabbed his bow and went to a wooded ridge on his 40 acres of property.

To his amazement, an eight-point buck wandered by. Shawn hit the deer, the largest he had ever killed with a bow. It seemed a good omen.

A few days later, Shawn flew with the boys, his father and Brian's twin sister, Brenda, to Washington to visit Sergeant Eisch at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At the entrance, they saw men in wheelchairs with no arms and no legs. Others were burned or missing eyes. Shawn feared what the boys would see inside Brian's room.

But Brian, giddy from painkillers, was his cheerful self. His right leg seemed almost normal. His left leg, swollen and stapled together, looked terrible. But it was a real leg, and it was still attached. The boys felt relieved.

Within days, Brian was wheeling himself around the hospital and cracking jokes with nurses, a green-and-yellow Green Bay Packers cap on his head. While Joey lost himself in coloring books and television, Isaac attended to his father's every need.

“I feel a little more grown up,” Isaac said. “I feel a lot more attached to him than I was when he left.”

One doctor told Brian that he would never be able to carry a rucksack or run again because of nerve damage in his left leg. Someone even asked him if he wanted the leg amputated, since he would certainly be able to run with a prosthetic. Brian refused, and vowed to prove the doctor wrong. By December, he was walking with a cane and driving.

For Shawn, too, the future had become murkier. It might be many weeks before Brian could reclaim his sons. But he also knew how glad the boys were to have their father back in one piece.

“Brian came home,” Shawn said one evening after visiting his brother in the hospital. “He didn't come home like we hoped he would come home, but he came home.”

“Every single day I think about all those families and all those kids that are not going to have a dad come home from Afghanistan,” he said. “That hurts more than watching my brother try to take a step because I know my brother will take a step and I know he's going to walk down the dock and get in his bass boat someday.”

It was late, and he had to get the boys up the next morning to visit their father at the hospital again. The holidays were fast approaching and the snow would soon be arriving in Wisconsin. Shawn wondered whether he could get Isaac out hunting before the season ended.

Yeah, he thought. He probably could.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/world/asia/31families.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Bomb Blast Damages Athens Court Building

ATHENS — A powerful bomb detonated outside a court building near central Athens on Thursday morning, but warning calls allowed the area to be cleared, the police said. There were no injuries, though the building and nearby cars were damaged.

The blast came as European concerns over the possibility of attacks by Islamist extremists is at a high pitch, but counterterrorism officials here remain focused on anarchists, like the Greek group that claimed responsibility for recent parcel bombs sent to foreign embassies in Athens and beyond. One addressed to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, reached her Berlin mailroom.

The authorities said that calls made about 7:40 a.m. to a private television station, Alter, and a daily newspaper, Eleftherotypia, warned that a bomb would go off in 40 minutes.

“In both cases, the caller said the device had been strapped to a scooter outside the courthouse and gave the scooter's registration number,” said an officer at the Athens police headquarters who spoke on ground rules of anonymity. “The explosion occurred two minutes after the deadline,” the officer said.

Police bomb disposal experts were examining the remnants of the device and the scooter.

A local resident told the Skai television station that he had seen two men in police uniforms pull up near the court building on a scooter about 6:30 a.m. The witness said he greeted the men, who told him the scooter had engine problems before getting into a white van parked nearby and being driven away by a third suspect.

Justice Minister Haris Kastanidis, who visited the scene, said that Greece would “not be intimidated by terrorist attacks.”

“There is no need for verbal condemnation,” he said. “We must simply continue with our job, using the methods we have been using.”

The officer at the Athens police headquarters said that another anonymous call made to the Eleftherotypia newspaper nearly an hour after the blast at the courthouse warned that a second bomb would go off at a tax office in southern Athens. By midday there had been no other explosion.

A much smaller explosion occurred outside the Greek Embassy in Buenos Aires in the middle of the night. The Greek Foreign Ministry said that unknown assailants had thrown a Molotov cocktail, and that it had caused no injuries and minor damage.

The Greek and Italian police have increased their cooperation in recent months in a bid to crack down on anarchist groups they believe are sharing knowledge and tactics.

The Athens blast came three days after an Italian guerrilla group called the Informal Anarchist Federation, or F.A.I, claimed responsibility for a letter bomb that exploded at the Greek Embassy in Rome, injuring two people. In its claim, the Italian group said its attack had been staged to express solidarity with 13 suspected members of the Greek group Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, who face trial next month. Two of them — Panagiotis Argyrou, 22, and Gerasimos Tsakalos, 24 — admitted to sending the recent string of parcel bombs.

“Conspiracy's project, like ours, is based on the action and methods of revolutionary violence,” the Italian group said in its claim.

The trial of the Greek suspects is set for Jan. 17, but the Athens police officer said it was not scheduled to take place in the courthouse damaged by the bomb on Thursday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/world/europe/31greece.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Abandoned Horses Are Latest Toll of Drug Trade

PHOENIX — Found tottering alone in the desert with their ribs visible and their heads hung low, horses play a backbreaking, unappreciated role in the multibillion-dollar drug smuggling industry.

Mexican traffickers strap heavy bales of marijuana or other illegal drugs to the horses' backs and march them north through mountain passes and across rough desert terrain. With little food and water, some collapse under their heavy loads. Others are turned loose when the contraband gets far enough into Arizona to be loaded into vehicles with more horsepower.

“We would pick up 15 to 20 horses a month, and many more of the animals would get past us,” said Brad Cowan, who spent 28 years as a livestock officer for the Arizona Department of Agriculture before retiring a few months back. “They wear poorly fitted equipment. It's obvious they were not well taken care of. The makeshift saddles rub big sores in their backs.”

Even once rescued, the horses face an uncertain future. Since they are not from the United States, the state of Arizona must draw their blood and conduct a battery of tests to ensure that they do not carry any disease that would infect domestic livestock. Then the horses head to auction, where some are bought and shipped back to Mexico for slaughter.

Others are luckier. They find their way to equine rescue operations, which help place them with homes.

“We just got a horse in, and he's sticks and bones, and his feet are horrific,” said July Glore, president of Heart of Tucson, a rescue operation that nurses the horses back to strength. “We get calls all the time about abandoned horses. How many do I have right now? One, two, three.”

One, named Lucky, had his tongue almost cut in half from the sharp wire bit put in his mouth. “I was told he was a drug horse,” Ms. Glore said.

Farther north, at the Arizona Equine Rescue Organization in New River, Soleil K. Dolce said drug horses were just part of the problem. Ms. Dolce responds to police calls about horses that have escaped from illegal rodeos and are running down the street. Horses are also left at freeway off-ramps or tied to fences by owners who no longer want them, she said.

Rehabilitating them is expensive and time consuming, Ms. Dolce said, and there is the possibility that some horses will never be adopted.

“I can't even describe the suffering these horses have gone through,” Ms. Dolce said, petting Rim Rock, who was abandoned in Tonto National Forest, east of Phoenix, several years ago and still suffers problems in his hooves.

It is sometimes not clear when a horse is discovered exactly how it came to be abandoned. State officials say the economic crisis has led to many more animals being let loose by owners no longer able to care for them. But the horses that are found with Mexican brands are presumed to be smuggling horses. And sometimes the authorities have no doubt: groups of horses or donkeys are discovered in the act, with bales of drugs on their backs and their human guides hiding.

Last year, seven horses laden with 971 pounds of marijuana were discovered by Border Patrol agents in the Patagonia Mountains in southern Arizona. The human smugglers had fled.

“I'd get angry when I'd see the condition these horses were in,” Mr. Cowan said. “The smugglers would buy them or steal them on the Mexican side and then work them almost to death. They have horrible sores that can take months to heal up.”

He recalled one horse he came across in Pima County, not far from the Mexican border, that had deep wounds in its hide, was clearly malnourished and was so weak that it was trying to sit back on its hind end to take the weight off its legs. Mr. Cowan and a co-worker had to carry the horse into a trailer.

Still, he said, horses are resilient. “They can come back from a lot,” he said.

Some of the abused horses end up back in the rugged border region where they were first found, Mr. Cowan said. Instead of smuggling, though, they are sometimes used by law enforcement agencies to pursue the traffickers who mistreated them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/us/31horses.html?ref=us

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Paterson and Federal Officials Reach Pact on Immigration

Gov. David A. Paterson, seeking to assuage critics of a new government program to strengthen immigration enforcement, said Thursday that he had negotiated a pact with federal officials to help protect illegal immigrants in New York without criminal records.

But the pact is unlikely to mollify the program's opponents. It does little more than reiterate the long-stated position of the Department of Homeland Security, which has said it intends to use the program primarily to detain and deport immigrants who are considered a threat to public safety and national security.

Under the enforcement program, called Secure Communities, fingerprints collected by local police departments are automatically shared with federal immigration officials. Mr. Paterson signed an agreement in May to cooperate with the program, which is going into effect state by state and is scheduled to start in New York by 2013.

In recent months, critics of the plan, including immigrant advocates and some elected officials, have urged the governor to withdraw from the program, saying it would mostly ensnare illegal immigrants with low-level convictions or no criminal history at all.

The pact, which Mr. Paterson signed this week, added language explaining the enforcement priorities of the Department of Homeland Security and clarifying that the agency will focus on deportable immigrants considered a threat to public safety and national security, as well as those who have been convicted of crimes or have illegally re-entered the United States after being deported.

“This new agreement balances the homeland security and civil liberties issues that have surrounded the Secure Communities initiative,” Mr. Paterson said in a statement.

Homeland Security officials said the agreement, however, did not alter the mechanisms of the Secure Communities program or hinder putting it into effect.

It also does not preclude immigration officials from detaining and deporting immigrants without criminal histories.

Under the program, the fingerprints of everyone booked into a local or county jail will be sent to the Homeland Security Department and compared with prints in the agency's databases. If officials discover that a suspect is in the country illegally, or is a noncitizen with a criminal record, they may seek to deport him.

Federal officials said a state could refuse to cooperate, but it would lose access to criminal databases of other states and the federal government, hampering crime-fighting efforts.

In his statement, Mr. Paterson said, “It is appropriate and important for New York State to share information with the federal government that could protect us from terrorist attacks.”

But some reacted to the new agreement with skepticism.

“My sense is that the governor caved to federal officials, and that's unfortunate,” said Scott M. Stringer, Manhattan's borough president and one of more than 40 elected officials who signed a letter last week urging Mr. Paterson to block the program in New York State.

Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the governor had lost an opportunity to curb immigration officials from “ramping up deportations of immigrants who are only the victims of our dysfunctional immigration system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/nyregion/31secure.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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No Pardon for Billy the Kid

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Billy the Kid, the Old West outlaw who killed at least three lawmen and tried to cut a deal from jail with territorial authorities, won't be pardoned, Gov. Bill Richardson said Friday, nearly 130 years after the gunslinger's death.

The prospect of a pardon for the notorious frontier figure drew international attention to New Mexico, centering on whether Billy the Kid had been promised a pardon from New Mexico's territorial governor in return for testimony in killings he had witnessed.

But the facts of the case didn't support a pardon, Richardson said Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America." He had been formally petitioned to grant one.

The proposed pardon covered the 1878 killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. Billy the Kid was shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881, a few months after escaping from the jail.

According to legend, Billy the Kid killed 21 people, one for each year of his life. But the New Mexico Tourism Department puts the total closer to nine.

Richardson, the former U.N. ambassador and Democratic presidential candidate, waited until the last minute to announce his decision. His term ends at midnight Friday.

The historical record on the pardon is unclear, and Richardson staff members told him in August there are no written documents "pertaining in any way" to a pardon in the papers of the territorial governor, Lew Wallace, who served in office from 1878 to 1881.

Richardson said he decided against a pardon "because of a lack of conclusiveness and the historical ambiguity as to why Gov. Wallace reneged on his promise."

Sheriff Pat Garrett's grandson J.P. Garrett and Wallace's great-grandson William Wallace expressed outrage over a pardon after Richardson set up a website in mid-December to hear from the public.

The website was established after Albuquerque attorney Randi McGinn submitted a formal petition for a pardon. Richardson's successor has criticized him for considering the pardon.

"We should not neglect the historical record and the history of the American West," Richardson said.

His office received 809 e-mails and letters in the survey that ended Sunday, with 430 favoring a pardon and 379 opposed. Comments came from all over the world.

McGinn argued that Lew Wallace promised to pardon the Kid, also known as William Bonney or Henry McCarty.

She said the Kid kept his end of the bargain, but the territorial governor did not.

The Kid was a ranch hand and gunslinger in the bloody Lincoln County War, a feud between factions vying to dominate the dry goods business and cattle trading in southern New Mexico.

Richardson has said the Kid is part of New Mexico history and he's been interested in the case for years. He's also pointed to the "good publicity" the state received over the pardon.

J.P. Garrett of Albuquerque said there's no proof Gov. Wallace offered a pardon — and may have tricked the Kid into testifying.

"The big picture is that Wallace obviously had no intent to pardon Billy — even telling a reporter that fact in an interview on April 28, 1881," he wrote. "So there was no 'pardon promise' that Wallace broke. But I do think there was a pardon 'trick,' in that Wallace led Billy on to get his testimony."

He also said that when the Kid was awaiting trial in Brady's killing, "he wrote four letters for aid, but never used the word 'pardon.'"

William Wallace of Westport, Conn., said his ancestor never promised a pardon and that pardoning the Kid "would declare Lew Wallace to have been a dishonorable liar."

Billy the Kid killed two deputies while escaping jail. McGinn's request did not cover those deaths, but Richardson said he had to consider them in his decision.

The Kid wrote Wallace in 1879, volunteering to testify if Wallace would annul pending charges against him, including a murder indictment in Brady's death.

A tantalizing part of the question is a clandestine meeting Wallace had with the Kid in Lincoln in March 1879. The Kid's letters leave no doubt he wanted Wallace to at least grant him immunity from prosecution.

Wallace, in arranging the meeting, responded: "I have authority to exempt you from prosecution if you will testify to what you say you know."

"It seems to me that when the government makes a deal with you, it should keep its promise," McGinn said after filing the request.

But when the Las Vegas, N.M., Gazette asked Wallace shortly before he left office about prospects he would spare the Kid's life, Wallace replied: "I can't see how a fellow like him should expect any clemency from me."

J.P. Garrett also contended Richardson should have designated an independent, impartial historian, and noted that Richardson appointed McGinn's husband to the state Supreme Court. McGinn has "meager qualifications" and a possible conflict of interest, William Wallace said.

McGinn insisted her only tie to the administration was in volunteering to look into the issue, knowing Richardson's interest.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/12/31/us/AP-US-Billy-the-Kid-Pardon.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Still Cruel, Less Usual

The tide continued ebbing on the death penalty this year. States are putting fewer people to death, and juries continue to favor the punishment of life without parole over execution when given the choice. A report released this month by the Death Penalty Information Center counted 46 executions in 2010. That is nearly 12 percent fewer than a year ago, and down sharply from the 85 executions of 2000.

Forty-six state-committed killings are 46 too many, but the drop was even felt in Texas, by far the national leader in executions. It killed 17 prisoners this year, 29 percent fewer than last year. The center, which opposes the death penalty, found that while juries imposed about the same number of death sentences this year as last — 114 in 2010, 112 in 2009 — that rate was still only about half what it was in the 1990s.

The center suggested a number of reasons for the decline, including that prosecutors and the public are grappling with the wrenching problem of innocence. The irreversible punishment of death requires a foolproof justice system, but growing numbers of DNA exonerations in recent years suggest that it is far from that.

What tempers the results is that some of the reluctance had nothing to do with enlightenment. Death rows and executions are expensive, and cash-strapped states seem more willing to investigate alternatives. And executions were postponed or canceled this year in Arkansas, California, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky simply because of a shortage of a lethal-injection drug.

Still there was good news in 2010. Electoral victories by candidates who oppose the death penalty, like the new governors of California and New York and the re-elected governor of Massachusetts, suggest that it's not a voters' litmus test or political third rail.

A judge in a state court in Texas, of all places, granted a hearing this month on whether the state's capital-punishment law is unconstitutional because of the high risk of executing the innocent. While the hearing has been temporarily halted, prominent former governors, prosecutors and legislators have urged that it continue. And in an essay this month in The New York Review of Books, John Paul Stevens, the retired Supreme Court justice, argued that capital punishment was neither fair nor an effective deterrent.

We can only hope the country is closer to putting its shameful experiment in state-sponsored death behind it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/opinion/31fri3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From MSNBC

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New Orleans getting rid of last FEMA trailers

Officials say Hurricane Katrina reminders are blight on city

Citing the remaining 221 trailers as blight, New Orleans officials have told the last remaining residents to be out by the start of 2011 or face steep fines.

New Orleans once had more than 23,000 FEMA trailers, and for many people still living in them, they are akin to permanent homes. These residents say they will find it hard to make the city's deadline.

Edwin Weber Jr., 62, lives with his brother in a trailer crammed with stuff. He was seething at a "notice of violation" letter taped to his door shortly before Christmas.

The letter said he would be fined — up to $500 a day — unless he took "immediate action" to move out. He said the notice was "worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge himself."

Engulfed by vines, Weber's trailer looks like a permanent fixture in the Gentilly Woods neighborhood in front of a home his family has owned since the 1950s. The house, Weber acknowledged, is still in bad shape.

"I haven't got the gas on yet. But I got water and electricity, so it is livable," he said, looking at the battered home. He reckoned he could move into the house, if they were forced to.

He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to house them outside the city, but they refused.

"I don't know what the big deal about trailers is," he said. "It's not like a hundred trailers is going to make the city look any worse than it is. It's not like the city has been fixed and repaired and these are the remaining eyesores."

City takes tough stance

Ann Duplessis, the city's deputy chief administrative officer, said city officials will be compassionate in considering each resident's case but hope to have most of the trailers removed within three months. "There may be some lingering, for that little old lady who has no place and no money," she said.

Still, she said the city will take a tough stance. "These trailers were meant to be temporary, not a permanent fixture."

She said many remaining trailer residents simply have not done enough to get out and refused to consider alternative housing. "People have to assume some responsibility for their decision," she said.

FEMA installed about 200,000 temporary housing units — travel trailers, park models and mobile homes — on the Gulf Coast after hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region in 2005. Louisiana got about 91,860 units and Mississippi about 44,000. There are 106 FEMA trailers left in Mississippi. Across Louisiana, about 520 remain.

According to FEMA, New Orleans got 23,314 trailers.

'Turn a page on Katrina'

The few remaining are on the hit list of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who's vowed to rid New Orleans of blight by eliminating 10,000 broken-down properties over the next three years.

"This administration wants to turn a page on Katrina," said Gary Clark, a Dillard University political science professor. "The FEMA trailer has become an icon of Katrina."

But some advocates fear Landrieu's zeal to eliminate blight will hurt poor people struggling to find their way in New Orleans more than five years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city in August 2005.

"The blight eradication program, if not done correctly, can become a poor-person eradication program," said Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a race relations center based at Tulane University.

He said many poor people were not given the help they needed to rebuild. "We never had a resettlement agency in this city for five years."

The city is warning trailer residents that they are in violation of city zoning ordinances and that waivers granted after Katrina will not be renewed. A letter that Weber received said the city understands "the challenges residents have endured post-Katrina" but that the trailers are blight.

Trailers turn grimy

The trailers do stand out. Beaten up by weather and use, the white trailers often are streaked in grime and intrude on sidewalks.

"I am very, very serious about the need to get these trailers out of the city of New Orleans," said Jon Johnson, a city councilman for eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward. "My mother-in-law has a trailer right next to her house blocking the sidewalk. That needs to go."

He said deadlines to remove trailers have been extended in the past, but the city should not back down this time.

On a street not far from Weber, Paul Delatte, a 50-year-old carpenter living in a FEMA trailer, was much further along in rebuilding his home than were the Webers. He said the home should be done by the end of January.

Delays in getting rebuilding aid slowed the work, Delatte said. He didn't have flood insurance on his house.

"I thought the rebuilding would be done within a year," he said over the sound of a nail gun and electric saw coming from inside his home. "You can't build anything without money."

He was grateful for the trailer, but he was looking forward to moving on. "They want me to be out of it. I want to be out of it. The neighborhood would love to see it gone," he said. "There's nothing I can do about it until I'm finished."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40858571/ns/us_news-life/

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From ICE

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ICE arrests 3, seizes 28,000 rounds of ammunition in Tucson

TUCSON, Ariz. - Three men are facing federal weapons smuggling charges after they were arrested with more than 28,000 rounds of ammunition by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tuesday in Tucson.

Nogales-based HSI special agents investigating a weapons smuggling operation identified a Tucson residence in the 1500 block of West Aztec Court believed to be tied to the scheme. Agents set up surveillance on the house and observed a white minivan leave the residence and proceed southbound toward Nogales, Ariz. HSI agents then coordinated with the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) to conduct a traffic stop based on probable cause developed by the DPS officer.

The van's occupants consented to allow a search of the vehicle, which revealed 9,240 rounds of ammunition of various calibers. As a result, Alejandro Ruiz-Escalante, 23, and Christian Gallegos-Arizmendi, 19, both citizens of Mexico, were arrested on federal weapons smuggling charges.

"Weapons smuggling along the Southwest border clearly contributes to ongoing public safety challenges in Mexico," said Matt Allen, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Arizona. "One of my top priorities is working with law enforcement partners like DPS to stem the flow of weapons and ammunition south of the border."

Based on information developed from the traffic stop, agents applied for and received a search warrant for the Tucson residence. The ICE Arizona Special Response Team served a search warrant on the property late Tuesday evening. Inside, agents discovered and seized an additional 19,750 rounds of ammunition, one .223 semi-automatic rifle and two .22 caliber rifles.

HSI agents arrested Jesus Lopez, 35, a U.S. citizen with an extensive criminal history and outstanding warrants for domestic violence and drug possession, at the residence. Lopez is also facing federal weapons charges. All three suspects had their initial appearance in federal court in Tucson Wednesday.

A criminal complaint is simply the method by which a person is charged with criminal activity and raises no inference of guilt. An individual is presumed innocent until competent evidence is presented to a jury that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The 9,240 rounds of ammunition recovered from the van included:

• 4,000 rounds of .223 cal
• 2,240 rounds of 7.62 cal
• 1,000 rounds of 9 mm
• 1,000 rounds of .38 super
• 500 rounds of .45 cal
• 500 rounds of .40 cal

The 19,750 rounds of ammunition recovered from the residence included:

• 4,000 rounds of .223 cal
• 6,000 rounds of 7.62 cal
• 3,000 rounds of .38 super
• 2,750 rounds of .45 cal
• 3,500 rounds of 9 mm
• 500 rounds of .40 cal

ICE takes custody of 3 individuals suspected of smuggling $48 million in cocaine

MIAMI - Special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) took custody of three suspected maritime drug smugglers in Miami on Wednesday and helped U.S. Coast Guard crewmembers offload 62 bales of cocaine weighing 3,400 pounds and worth an estimated wholesale value of $48 million.

 On Dec. 17, the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Thetis intercepted a go-fast boat 160 nautical miles off the coast of Colon, Panama. The cutter Thetis launched a small boat crew and was assisted by aircraft from the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Air and Marine Branch, to stop the go-fast vessel.

The bales were found and retrieved aboard the smuggling boat by Coast Guard boarding team members.

Assisted by ICE, crewmembers of the Key West-based Cutter Thetis offloaded the 62 bales of cocaine at the Coast Guard base in Miami Beach.

"We are ready to stop all contraband on the high seas with our partners, not only in the U.S., but those international agencies that work with us day to day," said Thetis commanding officer Cmdr. Douglas Schofield, U.S. Coast Guard.

"We are seeing more and more of these kinds of smuggling attempts, as organizations react to increased pressure on the southwest border," said Anthony V. Mangione, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Miami. "And we will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to put more and more pressure on the organizations that attempt to carry out these and other types of drug smuggling activities."

ICE HSI's investigation into the three suspected smugglers is being conducted by the Miami Border Enforcement Security Task Force (BEST). BEST was established in Miami in November 2008 and at other major seaports because U.S. ports and maritime borders are subject to significant threats to national security.

The mission of the BEST program is to identify, disrupt, and dismantle organizations that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. border through increased information sharing and collaboration among partner agencies. The Miami BEST incorporates personnel from ICE HSI; CBP Office of Border Patrol; the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the U.S. Coast Guard; and the Miami-Dade Police Department.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1012/101230miami.htm

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From the FBI

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The Year in Review

A Look at FBI Cases, Part 2

12/30/10

With our partners in the law enforcement and intelligence communities, the FBI worked thousands of investigations during 2010, from cyber crime and espionage to public corruption and multi-million-dollar fraud schemes. As the year draws to a close, we take a look back at some of 2010's most significant cases.

Part 1 focused on terrorism. This segment highlights some of the year's top cases from the FBI's other investigative priorities:

Operation Broken Trust: Earlier this month, we announced the largest investment fraud sweep ever conducted in the U.S.—211 cases involving more than 120,000 victims who lost more than $8 billion. The multi-agency investigation focused on scams directly targeting individual investors. Details

Operation Cross Country V: In November, a three-day operation in 40 U.S. cities led to the recovery of 69 children who were being victimized through prostitution. More than 850 individuals—including nearly 100 pimps—were arrested on state and local charges. Details

Health care fraud: In October, 73 defendants—including associates of an Armenian-American organized crime group—were indicted in five states in one of the largest Medicare fraud cases to date. Fraudulent billings and other related crimes totaled more than $163 million. Details

Operation Guard Shack: In what was likely the largest police corruption case in FBI history, nearly 1,000 Bureau personnel took part in a massive bust in San Juan, Puerto Rico in October to arrest 133 subjects, most of whom were police officers. Details

Operation Trident Breach: Also in October, a global investigation with our international partners resulted in a major cyber bust targeting a theft ring that used a Trojan horse virus to steal more than $70 million. Details

Piracy on the high seas: In August, a Somali man pled guilty in Virginia to acts of piracy against the USS Ashland in April. The man and five Somali accomplices believed the ship—cruising in the Gulf of Aden—was a merchant vessel and they attempted to seize it and hold it for ransom. Details

Russian spies arrested: In July, 10 individuals living seemingly normal lives in the U.S. pled guilty to being Russian spies and agreed to leave the country immediately. They had been arrested a month earlier after a lengthy undercover operation. Details

Operation Stolen Dreams: In June, nearly 500 people—from industry insiders to straw buyers—were arrested in a multi-agency nationwide mortgage fraud takedown. Total losses from a variety of fraud schemes were estimated to exceed $2 billion. Details

Project Deliverance: Also in June, we announced the results of a two-year multi-agency investigation on the U.S. Southwest border that yielded 2,200 arrests as well as seizures that included $154 million in U.S. currency and more than 71 tons of cocaine and marijuana. Details

Gang takedown: In May, nearly 600 local, state, and federal officers took part in one of the New York area's largest gang takedowns in recent memory. Indictments were unsealed against 78 members of two violent gangs, the Bloods and the Latin Kings. Details

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/december/cases-123010/cases_122710

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