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From the Los Angeles Times

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Rape flourishes in rubble of Haitian earthquake

Sexual violence against women has long been a scourge in Haiti, but rights activists had made real progress in recent years. Many of them died in the quake, and now women and girls are stalked by gang rapists.

by Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

February 4, 2011

Reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Halya Lagunesse thought she knew despair. Nearly seven years ago, the soldiers who had killed her husband gang-raped the Haitian woman and her daughter Joann, who was 17 at the time.

But that pain pales in comparison to the torment of learning last March that her 5-year-old granddaughter had been raped.

The attacker gave the child about 50 cents to go and buy rice. On her way back, he intercepted her and dragged her into a cemetery.

"How did that happen? How did that happen?" Lagunesse, 50, cried, wringing her hands.

"This situation does something to their minds and makes people sick," she said. "Their hearts are bad."

Hers is a tragedy of rape compounded: Her granddaughter, now 6, was conceived in the gang rape of her daughter.

::

Rape wasn't even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago.

The women who pushed for the legislation making it so also built Haiti's first shelter for abused women. Next they had hoped to make fathers legally bound to acknowledge their children and pay some support.

Haitian women are the poorest and most disenfranchised in this poorest of nations in the hemisphere. And yet, through the work of a spirited coterie of feminist activists, real strides were being made.

Until Jan. 12, 2010.

Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake killed hundreds of thousands, left this capital in ruins and sent more than a million people into a life in crowded, squalid camps.

It also devastated a strong and surprisingly successful women's movement, which, a year later, struggles like the rest of the nation to recover, even as women are being subjected to horrific sexual violence.

So much has been lost.

Magalie Marcelin, the indefatigable activist with the gap-toothed smile who founded one of Haiti's most important women's advocacy organizations, Kay Fanm. Crushed to death as she mentored an aspiring feminist.

Myriam Merlet, broad-faced, cheerily abrasive and endlessly effective, whether in her position at the Women's Ministry she helped shape or lobbying for the rape law she helped enact. Died in her home under a ton of concrete.

And there were so many more, equally and less famous, midwives, nuns and professors, peasant leaders and government officials, all who worked for women. All gone.

"It was a very big loss," activist Danielle Saint-Lot said. "We cried together. We are mourning together."

::

The young men were watching Fania Simone. They had picked her. Picked her for rape.

They went to her tent and seemed to know she would be alone. Her mother had left for the countryside in search of food.

Three of them. They wore masks. They threw her to the dirt floor. They kicked her in the ribs and slapped her face.

"If you tell anyone," one of her attackers threatened, "we will kill your brother or your sister."

After the rape, Simone, 23, sought medical attention. Then an organization that helps rape victims, Kofaviv, took her under its wing and gave her psychological counseling.

But she still lives in the plastic-tarp tent, and her attackers lurk, murmuring their threats, watching her.

"I feel very unsafe," said the young woman, whose bright eyes widen as she tells her story. "I have nowhere else to go. I am tortured."

Rape has long been a scourge in Haiti. It was used as a form of political repression in 1994 and in 2004, periods of upheaval when military dictators and their brutish gangs of enforcers seized power. Men who opposed the regime were abducted and killed, women raped. An entire generation of Haitians is filled with children of rape.

The earthquake generated new shockwaves of sexual violence. Hundreds, maybe thousands — there is no comprehensive count — have been raped. Some of the assaults are crimes of opportunity, but increasingly they seem a calculated, predatory form of stalking and attacking.

Only a few of an estimated 1,300 tent encampments that are spread through this shattered capital have nighttime lighting or significant police presence. Tents do not have doors or locks. People are jammed together in dehumanizing density without privacy.

Social networks and family unity have been destroyed by death and flight; children are often alone and unsupervised as their parents, if they have them, spend days searching for sustenance. The institutions of law and order, to the extent they ever had influence, have crumbled.

Young women are easy prey for uneducated, unemployed men who populate the camps, often stoned and with time on their hands. They see women and girls as fair game. Many women have denounced camp leaders, always male, for demanding sexual favors in return for tents, food and building materials.

Activists are bracing for a jump in teen pregnancies and HIV and AIDS cases, whether from rape or unprotected sex, since clinics that dispensed birth control and advice were also destroyed. The United Nations estimates that Port-au-Prince needs at least 1,000 maternal-care clinics. There are 10.

"We started receiving reports of rapes from the very first day after the quake," said Jocie Philistin, one of the women who run Kofaviv. "At first we thought, this can't be true! But it was."

::

"Women, I know you lift a lot of buckets of water. It's not enough. Work your arms!"

Murielle Dorismond, one of Haiti's top judo masters, is leading a self-defense workshop for women in the camps. Upper-body strength and self-confidence are the most important tools she tries to teach the women.

Several women's groups are taking action to confront the violence. International and national organizations have joined forces to arrange training sessions, psychological counseling and legal advice.

Kofaviv, which lost about 10% of its membership as well as its headquarters to the quake, sends "agents" into the camps to find women who have been attacked, averaging two cases a day. (And that, all involved say, is but a tip of the iceberg.)

Women have been given whistles and taught to use them.

Three short toots means, "I am being attacked."

One long toot: "I have found someone who has been raped and needs immediate help."

Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or "crime of passion," meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim. Then it was elevated into a serious crime with penalties. In addition, victims were allowed to seek care at any health facility, instead of the main state hospital, and no longer had to pay for the examination.

Still, victims are stigmatized, abusers rarely caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Malya Villard-Appolon, a founding member of Kofaviv, recalled how police leered at her 14-year-old daughter when the two went to a police station to report the girl's rape. One officer said girls and young women get raped because they're "in heat."

"Some of these men have the same old mentality," said Valerie Toureau, a doctor who works with rural women. "The woman for them is an object, one more piece of property. We've tried to change the mentality, but the effort has been nearly completely lost."

::

The voodoo priestesses thumped drums and lighted candles as they chanted the names.

Magalie…

Myriam…

"They were real fighters," Philistin, the activist, said. "Every woman in Haiti knows about these women. They gave their time and their souls for the progress of our struggle."

At this memorial ceremony on the first anniversary of the quake, huge photos of Magalie Marcelin, Myriam Merlet and others flanked the makeshift stage. Marcelin and Merlet, in their 50s when they died, were trained as lawyers but did their work in the streets and homes and government offices.

Merlet also wrote, collecting stories about Haitian women and campaigning to have streets named for some of the prominent ones. Marcelin once packed a courtroom with angry women to pressure for a guilty verdict against a politically connected man accused of beating his wife. Both had fought against Jean-Claude Duvalier's brutal regime, and each had spent time in exile or in hiding.

"Every day we try to recover and to replace them," said Yolette Mengual, chief of staff in the Women's Ministry, who was overseeing the memorial. "We can't. We are still searching. We have to keep fighting."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-haiti-women-20110204,0,6359500,print.story

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California prison guards union called main obstacle to keeping cellphones away from inmates

Members of the politically powerful union would have to be paid millions extra to be searched on their way to work. Prison employees, about half of whom are guards, are the main source of the smuggled phones.

by Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times

February 4, 2011

Reporting from Sacramento

Lawmakers struggling to keep cellphones away from California's most dangerous inmates say a main obstacle is the politically powerful prison guards union, whose members would have to be paid millions of dollars extra to be searched on their way into work.

Prison employees, roughly half of whom are unionized guards, are the main source of smuggled phones that inmates use to run drugs and other crimes, according to legislative analysts who examined the problem last year. Unlike visitors, staff can enter the facilities without passing through metal detectors.

While union officials' stated position is that they do not necessarily oppose searches, they cite a work requirement that corrections officers be paid for "walk time" — the minutes it takes them to get from the front gate to their posts behind prison walls.

Putting metal detectors along the route, with an airport-like regimen involving removal of steel-toed boots and equipment-laden belts, could double the walk time, adding several million dollars to officers' collective pay each year, according to a 2008 Senate analysis.

Since then, cellphones have proliferated exponentially in California's state lockups. This year, state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) is calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to "put the [search] issue on the table" in contract negotiations with the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

DOCUMENTS: Read analysis of proposed bill

"Everybody coming into the state Capitol building has to go through a metal detector…. You even get searched when you go to a Lakers game," said Padilla, who for three years has sponsored unsuccessful legislation to crack down on the contraband phones. "Why don't we have that requirement at correctional facilities, of all places?"

Brown, whose campaign received generous financial support from the union and who made one of his few public appearances between the November election and his January inauguration at the union's annual convention in Las Vegas, would not say whether searches are under review.

"Our office does not discuss the details of pending contract negotiations," said Brown spokesman Evan Westrup, who noted that the prison system is testing technology to block cellphone calls in prisons.

More than 10,000 cellphones made their way into California prisons last year — up from 1,400 in 2007, said corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton. Two of those wound up in the hands of Charles Manson, who is serving a life sentence for ordering the ritualistic murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969.

The phones can fetch as much as $1,000 each behind prison walls, according to a recent state inspector general's report, which detailed how a corrections officer made $150,000 in a single year smuggling phones to inmates. He was fired but was not prosecuted because it is not against the law to take cellphones into prison, although it is a violation of prison rules to possess them behind bars.

Analysts for the Senate Public Safety Committee who studied last year's legislation left no room for doubt about who they believed was responsible for most of the unauthorized phones.

"All indications are that the primary source of cellphones being smuggled into prisons is prison staff," they wrote . "The committee has been presented no evidence of visitors who are properly screened through metal detectors being responsible for the problem."

Guard union spokesman JeVaughn Baker said pointing the finger at corrections officers is all wrong.

"Sure, there are instances where officers have brought them in," Baker said. "But to say that prison staff are the most likely smugglers of cellphones is simply inaccurate."

Asked whether union members would be willing to forgo extra pay for standing in line at metal detectors, Baker said, "The law demands that individuals are compensated for the time that they work."

Padilla had a bill in 2008 that would have required searches of prison staff, but it died after union officials pointed out that extra pay would follow.

This year, Padilla, who also gets financial support from the union, has steered clear of it by omitting staff searches from a bill that would impose a $5,000 fine on anyone caught trying to smuggle a phone to an inmate. The proposal would also lengthen sentences for prisoners caught with phones by up to five years if it can be shown that they used them to commit crimes.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill last year, saying that the penalties weren't stiff enough.

Such punishment might not deter an inmate like Manson, who in all likelihood will die in prison, but the threat of added time might make other prisoners think twice about keeping a phone, Padilla said.

Prison officials added 30 days to Manson's sentence after guards found an LG flip phone under his mattress in March 2009. They found him with a second phone, equipped with a camera, on Jan. 6, Thornton said. She declined to provide details about where Manson got the phone, saying the case is still under investigation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prison-guards-20110204,0,3400029,print.story

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Phillip Garrido ruled competent to stand trial in Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping

The judge in the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping case ruled Thursday that defendant Phillip Garrido is mentally competent to stand trial for her 1991 abduction.

El Dorado County Superior Court Judge Douglas Phimister reviewed reports from psychiatrists and handed down the ruling Thursday shortly after 1 p.m.

Garrido and his wife, Nancy, are accused of kidnapping Dugard when she was 11-years-old and holding her captive for 18 years.

The case was on hold until Thursday because of questions about Garrido's mental competence. Lawyers for the prosecution and defense both agreed to allow the judge to decide on the issue.

Among the reports Phimister reviewed was an account from a court-appointed psychiatrist who met with Garrido to determine his mental state, said Jackie Davenport, El Dorado's assistant court executive officer.

An arraignment on Garrido's grand jury indictment is scheduled for the same day, officials said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/phillip-garrido-ruled-competent-trial-jaycee-lee-dugard-kidnapping.html

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Former California mental hospital chief guilty of abusing son

A former California mental hospital director, who prosecutors alleged had a history of sexually abusing young boys, was convicted Thursday of molesting his son.

A Long Beach jury found Claude Edward Foulk, 63, guilty on 31 counts of sexual molestation, including lewd acts on a child and sodomy by use of force. He was acquitted on four other counts.

His son, now 27, testified that he was abused from the age of 9 until he fled home at 21, and said he was “beyond happy” at the verdict. “I'm very relieved. He will never see the light of day,” he said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Gomez alleged that Foulk molested 11 other boys since 1966, but charges couldn't be filed in those cases because the statutory deadline had passed.

However, four of those victims, who are now adults, testified about the abuse at the trial. Those witnesses, who had lived in the foster care system or came from abusive homes, said Foulk showered them with gifts and affection, but began molesting them.

Until his arrest last year, Foulk worked as executive director of Napa State Hospital in Northern California, which mostly houses adults who are judged incompetent to stand trial or found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Defense attorney Richard Poland argued that the case hinged on the testimony of men with histories of lying, drug abuse and theft. “Just because people say something does not make it the truth,” he said. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 23. Foulk faces up to 248 years in prison.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/ex-hospital-director-guilty-of-abusing-son.html

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2 missing women may be Grim Sleeper victims, detective says

Los Angeles detectives have identified two more missing women they think alleged Grim Sleeper serial killer Lonnie Franklin may have killed.

Franklin, 58, has been charged with killing 10 women in South L.A. during two distinct periods -- the mid-1980s and from 2002 to 2007. The LA Weekly gave Franklin the "Sleeper" moniker because of the 14-year gap between killings allegedly committed by him.

From the outset of their investigation, however, LAPD detectives suspected the killer had been active during the period of apparent quiet.

Last week, LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne announced police had reopened two unsolved homicide cases of women killed during this period and police believe may have been killed by Franklin.

Kilcoyne added that investigators also were looking at four women who have been reported missing as possible victims.

He declined to provide any specifics about what led investigators to link Franklin to the homicides and missing-person cases.

He also provided an update on the effort to identify scores of women shown on a trove of photographs that was discovered during a search of Franklin's property after his July arrest. Police released the photos in December in hopes of locating the women and determining whether any may have been Franklin's victims.

To date, police have identified 74 women but still do not have identities of women seen in 57 of the photos.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/2-missing-women-may-be-grim-sleeper-victims-detective-says.html

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From the New York Times

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Monster or Savior? Doctor Draws New Scrutiny

ISTANBUL — For a surgeon wanted by Interpol and suspected of harvesting human organs for an international black-market trafficking ring, Yusef Sonmez, was remarkably relaxed as he sipped Turkish red wine in a bustling kebab restaurant facing the wind-whipped Sea of Marmara.

Dr. Sonmez, refreshed from a ski trip to Austria, spoke last month while on a break from business trips to Israel and operations on cancer patients here.

He boasts about the satisfaction of his kidney transplant surgeries, more then 2,400 by his count. He keeps friends (and, incidentally, investigators) up to date on his life via a blog and his Web site listing contact details. And in his seaside villa on the Asian side of Istanbul, he treasures a framed copy of a signed letter in 2003 from the Ministry of Health in Israel commending him for his life-saving aid to “hundreds of Israeli patients who are suffering from kidney diseases and awaiting transplants.”

Yet Interpol is circulating an international red-alert notice for the Turkish surgeon's arrest with a mug shot of him in a surgical scrub cap. The Turkish authorities have shut down his private hospital. The local press has labeled him “Dr. Frankenstein.” And an expert who monitors the lurid and lucrative global trade in human organs says Dr. Sonmez has been arrested at least six times in Turkey.

“There are two Yusufs, one my family and friends know and the one created in the press who is a monster— this is a drama, a tragedy,” said Dr. Sonmez, 53, a trim, angular man with intense, gray-green eyes and a graying goatee. “Up to now, I didn't kill anybody. I didn't harm anybody, counting donors or recipients. I have not committed any kind of social harm to anyone. This is the main thing that I am proud of.”

Of his surgical skills, he added, wryly, “I am the best in the world as long as my fingers aren't broken.”

The illicit trade in human organs is a multimillion-dollar business built on paying desperately poor people to extract their organs— mostly kidneys. These organs are then sold and transplanted to wealthier people facing long waits on government-approved lists for legal transplants.

Dr. Sonmez is wanted with regard to one of the most troubling prosecutions to emerge recently— a European Union investigation into trafficking in Kosovo in which seven people, mostly prominent local doctors, have been charged with illegal kidney transplants in a private clinic. Dr. Sonmez has not been charged in Kosovo, but the prosecution contends he played a central role in the ring.

That case has become intertwined with a volatile two-year Council of Europe inquiry that made links between the Kosovo prime minister, Hashim Thaci, and a criminal enterprise of some former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters accused of executing Serbian prisoners in 1999 and 2000 for their organs.

Dr. Sonmez has denied wrongdoing in either situation, but a Turkish immigrant who lost consciousness at an airport in Kosovo after a kidney removal, and the patient who investigators say received his kidney, both identified Dr. Sonmez as part of the operating team. He says he was only in the operating room offering advice to others.

Investigators have focused on the role of Dr. Sonmez in 2008 as a surgeon for the Medicus private clinic in a rundown neighborhood in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, where they said kidneys were removed from impoverished immigrants recruited on false promises of payment that they never received. The organs were transplanted to wealthy patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel who paid up to €90,000, or $122,000.

In Turkey, he was not really seen as a hero in the traditional sense but as someone who stood up against the establishment because he kept operating even though he was exiled from one hospital to the next, said Aslihan Sanal, an anthropologist who has researched the activities of Dr. Sonmez in Turkey and found that patients measured him by their ability to survive.

Dr. Sonmez has been detained and released repeatedly in Istanbul during investigations of illegal transplants and money exchanges between donors and recipients. The son of an English teacher and a dentist, he said he trained at an Istanbul medical school and studied transplant surgery in Paris. He said the five-year survival rate for his kidney transplant patients was 84.7 percent, above Western standards, though it was not clear how many of the donors he had seen again.

By his estimate, most of the thousands of transplants he has performed since he began in 1992 involved live, unrelated donors. He said his survival rate was high because he presided over the removal and transplant of kidneys, monitoring patients side by side for 48 hours.

“This is amazing,” he said of the transplant process. “I love it — to watch the changes with the new organ, the changes in the body, to move with the changes, to make changes in the medication.”

Typically, he said, he requires donors and recipients to submit signed, notarized statements to declare that money has not been exchanged.

How does he know that desperately poor kidney donors are not being exploited by a murky world of brokers, fixers and wealthy donors with lavish insurance?

“I don't need to ask these questions,” he said, “because I do believe that people have their own authority over their own body. They are not stealing, they are not cheating. So this is the shame of the system. Not their shame.”

Given his legal problems, he said he has not performed a kidney transplant in two months, he said, since an operation in a country he declined to identify.

The surgeon's travails in Kosovo began after Yilman Altun, a Turkish man, 23, collapsed while waiting for a flight out of Kosovo in November 2008. Customs officials found a fresh scar in an arc across his abdomen and both Mr. Altun and a 74-year-old Israeli, Bezalel Shafron — who paid €90,000 for a kidney transplant — identified Dr. Sonmez as participating in the surgery.

Unable to operate his own hospital — which was shut after the Turkish authorities accused it of illegal transplant surgeries in 2007, an action he is appealing— Dr. Sonmez said he was invited by a Kosovo urology professor to work at Medicus. He offered a document from the Kosovo Ministry of Health that gave him a temporary appointment in 2008 as a general surgeon, along with the condition that the clinic obtain a license, which it lacked.

At least 20 kidney operations, according to the charges, were performed at the rose-colored private clinic near a dirt track, including those involving Mr. Altun and Mr. Shafron. Dr. Sonmez said he participated simply as an adviser for the men's transplant surgery.

“I was standing there among the other physicians,” he said, adding that he left the clinic after two days, and arguing that he would have stayed until the patients were discharged if they were his responsibility.

But in a district court in Pristina in December, the E.U. prosecutor Jonathan Ratel argued that Dr. Sonmez played a central role in transplants that took place in 2008, along with 11 other suspects, including a former secretary of health in Kosovo, and an Israeli doctor.

The court is expected to decide this week whether to press forward with a trial against seven people charged so far in the case, in which Turks, Russians, Moldovans and Kazakhs were allegedly lured to Pristina with false promises of payments for their kidneys.

In recent weeks, the Medicus clinic case has become linked with the much more explosive organ trafficking case, dating to Kosovo's war of independence in 1998 and 1999, that has stirred tensions between Serbia and Kosovo.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe — an organization of almost 50 nations that investigates human rights issues — adopted the report of a two-year inquiry that alleges that some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army held Serb prisoners in detention centers in Albania and executed them with gunshots to the head to extract organs for shipment to Istanbul.

The report — based on intelligence reports and witness interviews — contends there is a link between that ring and Medicus with the same international channels and people doing surgical operations. The report, prepared by a Swiss senator, Dick Marty, contended that the earlier case is tied to the Pristina clinic, “through prominent Kosovar Albanian and international personalities who feature as co-conspirators in both.”

Dr. Sonmez denies being in Kosovo during the earlier period, and says he would never transplant a kidney that he had not removed himself.

Others contend that Dr. Sonmez's role goes far beyond Kosovo and Turkey, that he has played a key part in the globalization of trade in human kidneys, particularly for matching paid donors with patients from Israel, where for religious reasons there is a shortage of kidney donors and where health insurance plans pay for transplants abroad.

“I have covered his tracks,” said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and director of Organ Watch, which researches the organ trade and follows ailing and destitute kidney donors. “He is a transplant surgeon who has worked for years in many parts of the world with brokers who bring together donors with recipients. He is wanted in many countries and he knows what he is doing is illegal.”

In the next few weeks, Dr. Sonmez and his lawyer are poised to head to Kosovo to give his statements.

“They want information about bigger fish,” said Murat Sofuoglu, an old friend and lawyer for Mr. Sonmez, who has been shuttling between Istanbul and Pristina to negotiate terms for the doctor to give a statement to prosecutors.

“Not me,” Dr. Sonmez said, picking at a honey-drenched piece of baklava. “I am not the big fish.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/world/europe/04iht-organ04.html?_r=1&ref=world

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Police Chief Is Shot Dead in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — Just over a month after he took charge of the police force in one of the country's most violent cities, Manuel Farfán, a former brigadier general in the army, died Thursday in a torrent of bullets.

Mr. Farfán, 55, had been appointed police chief in Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, with great acclaim. He was one of 11 retired military officers appointed in the past year as local chiefs in troubled Tamaulipas State, a recent hot spot of smuggling and battles among rival drug trafficking organizations.

The army officers come from one of Mexico's most trusted institutions and are seen as the kind of independent iron fist needed to clean up corrupt police forces and take on organized crime.

The former police chief in Tijuana was an army officer credited with making gains against crime but also accused, by human rights groups, of attaining them through excessive force.

Mr. Farfán's short tenure suggests that even those with a military pedigree may not be able to escape the powerful gangs, which assassinated the police chief in Nuevo Laredo in 2005 just hours after he took office.

The police gave no motive for Mr. Farfán's slaying, but it bore the hallmarks of an organized crime attack, delivered with high-powered weapons as he drove home in his pickup truck. Aside from Mr. Farfán, two of his bodyguards and his personal assistant were killed.

Mr. Farfán talked a hard line. In early January, he announced a list of 50 extortionists the police would hunt down, in part by posting their pictures around town. He also promised to fire officers who could not pass polygraphs and other confidence tests.

Mexican government statistics show that 115 people were killed in Nuevo Laredo last year in violence related to organized crime, a significant increase from the 12 tallied in the city in 2009.

Egidio Torre Cantú, the governor of Tamaulipas who took office Jan. 1, pledged a crackdown on organized crime, speaking from personal experience. His brother, Rodolfo, was assassinated in June while running for governor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/world/americas/04mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Authorities Faulted in Fort Hood Attack

WASHINGTON — Various federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies missed an opportunity to prevent the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead and dozens injured, even though they had information that the man charged in the attack, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had communicated with a terrorism suspect and harbored extreme political proclivities, according to a new report.

The report was prepared by the offices of Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and Susan Collins, who said they were rebuffed numerous times by law enforcement and other government agencies in their attempt to investigate the attack. Mr. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Ms. Collins, of Maine, is the ranking Republican.

The conclusions of the report echoed a Pentagon review released last year that detailed a systemic breakdown within the military that permitted Major Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, to advance through the ranks despite concerns that he embraced violent Islamic extremism.

“Instead of disciplining him or removing him from the military altogether,” Mr. Lieberman said at a news conference at Capitol Hill, “they inexplicably promoted him and, in my opinion, outrageously suggested that the evidence of his radicalization showed a knowledge of Islam that could benefit our military and our country instead of showing that he was a clear and present danger to our military and our country.”

Among the findings, the senators said, was that government officials knew Major Hasan had communicated with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric and terrorism suspect now residing in Yemen, but failed to alert the Army of this fact; that from 2003 to 2009, when he was a psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he openly suggested that revenge might be a defense for the Sept. 11 attacks; and that he spoke defensively about Osama bin Laden.

“But what followed,” Mr. Lieberman said, “was a lackadaisical investigation of Hasan by the F.B.I., coupled with internal disagreements and a failure to use effective intelligence analysis that led the bureau to end its inquiry into Hasan prematurely, thereby, I'm afraid, contributing to the government's failure to prevent the attack at Fort Hood.”

Ms. Collins sharply faulted the “the inexcusably inadequate investigation conducted by the Washington Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

“As the chairman has pointed out,” she said, “it was about a half-day — four hours.”

The accusations of poor communication and coordination are similar to those made about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman, said, “We appreciate the committee's efforts to examine circumstances surrounding the Fort Hood shooting incident, and we will closely examine the report's findings and recommendations.”

In a statement, the F.B.I. said, “During the internal F.B.I. review undertaken immediately after the attack at Fort Hood, we identified several of the areas of concern outlined in the report, and, as noted in the report, have implemented changes to our systems and processes to address them.”

The report said the F.B.I. and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces ought to share information more effectively and coordinate operations with other federal, state and local agencies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04hood.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Lubbock Police Department debuts new community alert system

Lubbock residents can now sign up for free e-mail and text alerts directly from the Lubbock Police Department to be notified of the latest emergency situations in their neighborhoods.

The department on Thursday launched NIXLE— a community information service designed specifically so law enforcement can quickly alert the public about important information as it happens, such as Amber Alerts, fugitives on the loose, significant crimes in progress and major traffic situations.

The alerts will immediately show up on residents' phones via SMS text messaging, in their e-mail inbox, or both, depending on how they want it.

Lubbock Police Capt. Greg Stevens said he hopes the service will help improve public safety by allowing police to send out information quickly to the entire city or specified areas.

“We're opening new ways to reach out to the community,” Stevens said. “We want to keep the public aware of criminal activity in the city and our response to it.”

For example, the department can use Nixle to send out a mass alert in a certain neighborhood to let residents know about a developing hostage situation on the block and the possible dangers. They could quickly advise neighbors to stay inside their homes and lock the doors or to evacuate.

Other examples could include: a bank robbery down the street that just occurred or a major traffic accident that is blocking a busy intersection during the lunch hour, Stevens said.

The department also plans to use Nixle to help find fugitives, such as somebody wanted on murder charges or other dangerous suspects believed to be in the area.

“It will help keep the public safe,” Stevens said. “It will help us solve crimes.”

The use of Nixle by law enforcement has been a growing trend since early 2009. According to the company, more than 4,000 agencies nationwide use Nixle in their communities, including the Amarillo Police Department.

Amarillo Sgt. Brent Barbee said the free service has been very beneficial to the department and community since it started using it in September 2009.

He said there's been at least one instance where police arrested a fugitive because of Nixle.

“What's really important to me is we have a way to communicate with the public and the media and tell them a lot of things that we couldn't before,” Barbee said.

The Amarillo department also has used Nixle to alert residents of school lockdowns, dispense crime prevention tips and alert residents of neighborhood crime trends.

Modern times

Lubbock police officials believe Nixle will help them reach more residents, and compliment — rather than replace — the current system to notify residents in certain areas of emergency situations via a landline phone.

The department already employs a system called Reverse 911 that allows emergency dispatchers to send out a mass message to specified geographic locations.

For example, Stevens said, the Police Department was gearing up to utilize Reverse 911 in the area around the hostage situation Tuesday morning in the 2100 block of 71st Street. The situation ended peacefully before officials sent out the message to get neighbors evacuated.

However, the Reverse 911 system wouldn't have been able to send an automated message to residents in homes without landlines because it currently doesn't have the ability to send messages to cell phones.

“More and more people are dropping landline services,” Stevens said, which has left a gap in how many people can be reached in emergency situations, such as in cases of evacuations or large-scale natural disasters.

The department is considering purchasing an add-on feature to the Reverse 911 system that will allow officials to reach cell phones as well, but no official plans have been made.

If the department buys the add-on, Stevens said, residents will have to sign up to be on the call list.

Stevens said even if the department adds cell phones to the Reverse 911 system, Nixle will expand options for police and residents.

The agency will use Nixle more frequently to dispense more messages and more information by both text and e-mail.

The Reverse 911 system, which doesn't require a subscription, is only occasionally utilized. Stevens said it may be used a couple times a year.

“(Nixle) gives a lot of options to the citizens of Lubbock,” Stevens said. “The whole idea is to make sure we are reaching as many segments of our community as we can.”

How Nixle works

Residents can sign up for Nixle alerts by going to the Lubbock Police Department website" www.lubbockpolice.com.

Community members can provide their address so police can send information by geographic location as well as citywide.

Nixle users also can customize how they want to receive certain types of information.

There are four types of messages — alerts, advisories, traffic and community, according to the company.

All messages classified as “alerts” will be urgent notifications designed to only be used in emergency situations, such as a developing hostage situation or an Amber Alert.

Nixle users can decide whether they want to receive all messages via text on their cell phones or just emergency alerts. If residents choose that option, the advisory messages will only be sent to e-mail accounts.

Alerts sent via SMS text message will only include a summary message of 132 characters or less. Residents can view full messages by e-mail or on the Nixle website.

The service is free for both residents and the Police Department.

Stevens said while Nixle is providing the service to the agency for free, officials expect it to be time-consuming for designated officers.

Sgt. Jonathan Stewart, who recently transferred to the department's Neighborhood Services Unit, will operate the service, but other top-ranking officials also will have access to the account.

According to Nixle, the service is provided through a secure system designed specifically for law enforcement and will never include any advertising.

The company is a partner with the International Public Safety and Justice Network, a computer-based message switching system that links local, state and federal law enforcement and justice agencies for the purpose of exchanging information, according to the company's website.

Nixle's servers are housed within the Justice Network's secure facility.

The secure system is one major difference between Nixle and social networking sites, according to the company. It also provides one standardized service for consumers to receive immediate and credible neighborhood-level information, the company says.

http://lubbockonline.com/crime-and-courts/2011-02-04/lubbock-police-department-debuts-new-community-alert-system

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"Blue Alert" system for law officers

You're probably familiar with Amber Alerts. That's a program where law enforcement agencies cooperate with the news media, wireless companies and now even Twitter and Facebook, to get instant information out about serious child abduction cases.

Washington is considering a Blue Alert system to immediately put out information about suspects when a police officer is missing, injured or killed in the line of duty.

The Blue Alert would be a "quick response system designed to issue and coordinate alerts following an attack upon a law enforcement officer." As with Amber Alerts, which are only posted when police suspect a child is in danger, the Blue Alerts would be used when a suspect has not been apprehended and is considered a serious threat to the public.

The legislation comes from Mike Hope, a 44th District Representative and Seattle Police Officer.

"Since this would use the existing system, there would be very little, if any, cost to operate it," Hope says. "Getting information out about an immediate threat in our neighborhoods will save lives. The criminals who harm law enforcement officers won't think twice about harming average citizens. These are usually the most dangerous and violent criminals. This is about protecting our cities, counties and state."

Makes sense, no cost. Is there a reasonable argument against this?

The Washington Council of Police and Sheriff gave Hope their legislator of the year award this week. The law enforcement group recognized him for his work on the Lakewood Police Officers' Memorial Act, which voters approved in last November's election. It gives judges more discretion to deny bail to suspects facing a life sentence and who are deemed dangerous to the community.

http://www.mynorthwest.com/category/news_chick_blog/20110204/%22Blue-Alert%22-system-for-law-officers/

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High Recovery Rate For Missing Children In Jamaica

by Anastasia Cunningham, Senior Gleaner Writer

February 4, 2011

Jamaica -- Though children still make up the largest percentage of persons reported missing, with figures showing them accounting for up to 70 per cent of cases, the recovery rate has drastically improved since 2009.

According to statistics from the Missing Person Call Centre (MPCC), which falls under the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), of the 2,394 people reported missing for the period January to December last year, 1,680 were children. Of those children, 1,248 have returned home.

The figures also include habitual missing children.

Fifty-nine people were found dead, eight of whom were children, and 424 remain missing.

For 2008, it was reported that 960 went missing, while for 2009, 1,770 disappeared.

The head of the Ananda Alert system has attributed the high recovery rate of missing children to the introduction of that mechanism.

"In fact, for the first quarter of last year, 55 per cent of children reported missing were recovered and there was a gradual improvement, reaching a high of 70 per cent by December," said Wayne Robertson, who is also senior director, strategic policy, planning and reform in the Department of Local Government.

"This speaks to the whole success of the dissemination of the alerts. What it does is trigger awareness of the missing persons."

The Ananda Alert was introduced in May 2009 and named after 11-year-old Ananda Dean, who was abducted and brutally murdered the previous year. It is Jamaica's version of the Amber Alert for missing children which was developed in response to the 1996 abduction and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman in the United States. The system targets children up to age 18.

Cleared-up cases

The introduction of the MPCC in April last year has also helped to reduce the figure.

According to Steve Brown, head of the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN), since the centre was set up, the police have managed to clear a significant percentage of the cases.

"Several persons reported missing actually returned home or were located by the family but the police were not informed. When the missing persons' centre started doing follow-ups on each case, we were able to close a number of them," said Brown.

According to the statistics, the age group 14 to 16 has the highest incidence of missing persons. The youngest in recent history is two-year-old Augustus 'Baby Ralston' Mitchell, but Brown said there have been cases of newborn babies being taken from hospitals.

The figures also revealed that eight out of every 10 children reported missing were girls. St Catherine, St Andrew, Kingston and Clarendon have the highest number of missing children.

"The Spanish Town corridor is frightening," said Robertson.

He said the general trend was that the areas with the larger numbers of missing children usually have the higher crime rates.

"The data is also frightening that all the cases of missing children are from the lower level of the socio-economic ladder," Robertson said. "It frightened us when we saw it because we kept seeing a recurrence. We don't know if persons uptown are victims of abduction or otherwise but they are not reporting the children as being missing. What the data is saying is that the reports are all from a certain socio-economic grouping. It says something and, of course, the state will now have to look at interventions in that regard, which include parenting seminars."

Citing a myriad of reasons for children going missing, Brown noted that only five per cent of those gone missing were abducted.

"The stepfather syndrome has become a major factor. In a lot of the cases, the stepfathers are the ones abusing the children, both boys and girls," said Robertson.

Brown also said almost 95 per cent of the cases solved were through the efforts of the police.

Why kids go missing

In some counselling sessions that police and various support groups hold with children who return home, the following were revealed as some of the reasons they go missing.

• Broken homes
• Peer pressure
• Sexual, physical or verbal abuse at home
• Poverty
• Rebellion
• Lured away by men
• Abducted or captured
• Went with a boyfriend
• Lured through chat rooms on the Internet or cellphones.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110204/lead/lead5.html

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From ICE

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ICE arrests 2, detains 53 at Phoenix drop house

PHOENIX - Two Mexican citizens appeared in federal court to face human smuggling charges Monday following the discovery of a Phoenix drop house by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations Friday where agents detained 53 illegal aliens.

Edgar Meza-Bustamante, 23, and Cruz Gerardo Meza-Tirado, 34, both citizens of Mexico illegally present in the United States, were arrested at the drop house located at 11226 West Roma Avenue in Phoenix. HSI agents, following a tip from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, identified the possible drop house and knocked on the front door. They then gained entry after several illegal aliens attempted to flee through the back of the residence.

In addition to the two suspects, agents discovered 53 illegal aliens from Mexico, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. While the majority of the aliens are adult males, the detained aliens also included seven females and six juvenile males.

"While Arizona is the busiest human smuggling corridor in the United States, it is unusual to find so many aliens in the same drop house," said Matt Allen, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Arizona. "This is a good reminder to human smugglers that they are not welcome in our communities. We are out there looking for them, and when we find them they will be arrested and prosecuted."

The two suspects made their initial appearance in federal court Monday on human smuggling charges.

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.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1101/110131phoenix.htm

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From the FBI

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Berlin Man Sentenced to More Than Eight Years in Prison for Amassing Arsenal of Illegal Weapons

David B. Fein, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that ALAN D. ZALESKI, 49, of Berlin, Connecticut, was sentenced today by Senior United States District Judge Ellen Bree Burns in New Haven to 101 months of imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release, for illegally possessing machine guns and numerous other unregistered weapons, including a sawed-off shotgun, silencers, grenades, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). On March 27, 2009, a jury found ZALESKI guilty of 28 counts related to the illegal possession of those firearms.

“This defendant possessed an arsenal of illegal weapons, the size and scope of which Connecticut law enforcement has rarely, if ever, encountered,” stated U.S. Attorney Fein. “I want to commend the FBI, ATF, Connecticut State Police, and the police departments that investigated this matter, as well as an alert citizen who first notified law enforcement authorities to this potentially dangerous situation.”

According to the evidence provided at trial, in 2005, a tree cutter contracted by a local utility company went to ZALESKI's heavily-wooded property in Berlin to cut back some trees from power lines and inadvertently tripped over one of several tripwires set up on the property, triggering a percussion explosive that detonated and caused him permanent hearing loss in one ear. When the utility worker returned to the property in August 2006 and noticed the tripwires again, he contacted the police.

Law enforcement officers responded and spent the next three days systematically searching ZALESKI's property, rendering many hazards safe, and seizing numerous weapons. During the course of the search, officers seized dozens of fully automatic machine guns and semi-automatic firearms, multiple rifles and handguns, as well as silencers, fragmentation grenades, chemical grenades, smoke grenades, and various homemade pipe bombs and IEDs. ZALESKI also was found in possession of more than 67,000 rounds of live ammunition and numerous components for making additional grenades, IEDs, and bombs, including ammonium nitrate and nitro methane. Investigators also discovered that ZALESKI's property was protected by several booby traps, including tripwires connected to percussion explosives and camouflaged plywood boards on the ground with nails sticking up through them.

ZALESKI also possessed dozens of how-to books on making bombs and IEDs, converting semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic weapons, and making homemade silencers.

Law enforcement worked over a three-day period in August 2006 to seize more than 600 separate items of evidentiary value from ZALESKI's residence, one of the largest seizures of illegal weapons and other paraphernalia in state history.

ZALESKI has been detained since March 27, 2009.

This matter was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Connecticut State Police Bomb Squad, Emergency Services Unit, and Major Crime Squad; and the Berlin, New Britain and New Haven Police Departments.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Paul Murphy and Stephen Reynolds.

http://newhaven.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel11/nh020311.htm

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