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From the Los Angeles Times

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U.S. agents short-staffed and under the gun in Mexico

A lack of resources, a policy against arming agents and staffers who don't speak Spanish hamper U.S. agents trying to stem the flow of weapons to drug cartels, say current and ex-staff members.

by Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

March 8, 2011

U.S. authorities in Mexico charged with stemming the flow of U.S. weapons to drug cartels have been hampered by shortfalls in staffing, agents with limited Spanish skills and the difficulty of recruiting new agents to the dangerous posting because they can't officially carry weapons, current and former staff members say.

Facing new accusations that investigators with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed buyers to funnel high-powered assault weapons into Mexico, a senior agent posted to Mexico before 2010 said the agency had not fielded the resources necessary to block mass movements of weapons across the Southwest border.

These movements have come under scrutiny amid revelations that ATF investigators delayed for months the arrests of suspected cartel gun buyers, allowing the flow of hundreds of weapons to Mexico in the hope of catching bigger buyers. The policy has outraged many agents and prompted a Senate investigation.

On Monday, most of the architects of the Phoenix-based operation, known as "Fast and Furious," were called to Washington to discuss the operation. Acting ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson announced he would ask a panel of police professionals to review the bureau's firearms trafficking strategies.

Rene Jaquez, a former ATF attache in Mexico City and deputy attache in Ciudad Juarez, said Monday that agents in Mexico did not have the resources to effectively run down gun smugglers.

"I can tell you from my perspective as the former country attache in Mexico … that ATF has not taken seriously its role in the international affairs program as far as Mexico is concerned," Jaquez said in an interview.

Jaquez said ATF field offices in Mexico were so short-staffed that agents were either forced to spend most of their time on paperwork or didn't have necessary backup to safely do street work.

"It was one meeting after another. At the end of the week, you ask, 'What did I do?' And ultimately the question has to be asked, OK, ATF has put all this money into Mexico, what have we done? How many guns have we stopped from coming into the country? Well, this whole scandal shows we've probably allowed more guns into the country than guns we've stopped," Jaquez said.

"The next question is: How many people have gone to jail compared to three years ago, when we had only three people there? The answer is none. There is no difference," he said. "We have no prosecutions that have resulted from us being in Mexico City."

Other agents said there had been some prosecutions, but they were few because the agency had not deployed enough staff to make a real dent in firearms trafficking.

"We don't have the ability to follow up on investigations because we don't have the resources to do so," said one agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because agents are forbidden to speak to the press. "We're at max capacity."

Jaquez said the agency was recently able to expand from its presence in Mexico City and Monterrey, opening satellite offices and electronic gun-tracing operations in eight other Mexican towns.

But Jaquez said he complained to ATF management that the new offices would be largely ineffective for mounting firearms investigations if they did not each include at least four agents and a supervisor. Some offices, he said, had only a single agent — sometimes one who didn't speak good Spanish.

"At [two of our offices] we have a non-Spanish speaker and an iffy Spanish speaker," Jaquez said. "So how do you go out there and do anything, when ATF hasn't taken it seriously enough to even send Spanish speakers down to Mexico?"

Jaquez said ATF agents had helped Mexican law enforcement disarm explosives and investigate the growing number of car bombs south of the border, but had been less successful in pushing firearms trafficking investigations into the Mexican cartels because of the staffing shortfalls.

Several agents said the bigger problem was not in Mexico, but shortfalls in staffing and gun laws in the U.S., which had prevented the ATF from adequately monitoring multiple sales of semiautomatic rifles to suspicious buyers.

"We have roughly the same amount of people we had when they founded us in 1972," one agent said.

He said Congress and the Obama administration had refused to support the ATF's proposal to require federally licensed gun sellers to report multiple sales of long-barreled rifles, as they were with handguns, to a single buyer.

"Can someone tell me how I can find out if Joe Blow just bought 50 guns at a gun store? If they do, I'll be happy to sit outside the door and ask him why he bought them. But otherwise, I won't know until they start showing up at crime scenes," the agent said.

Adding to the difficulty of operating in Mexico, some ATF staffers said, is the growing difficulty in recruiting agents since the death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata, whose vehicle came under attack between San Luis Potosi and Mexico City on Feb. 15. Zapata's partner, Victor Avila, survived.

The brazen daylight shooting has raised new worries about Mexico's longstanding ban on U.S. agents carrying weapons in most circumstances.

"Ever since Jaime Zapata was killed, the game has changed. They're killing federal agents now," one agent said. "If we got $20 million tomorrow to fully staff every office in Mexico, guys would say, 'We're not going. You won't protect us. The Mexican government won't protect us, and the U.S. government won't let me protect myself.' "

Jaquez said he made the decision to speak publicly about operations in Mexico after being transferred against his will to Washington. He said he believed he was moved in retaliation for suspicions that he criticized the "Fast and Furious" operation.

"I went to high school in Mexico. I know the culture. I know the government. And, you know, there's very few of us in the country that could say that," he said. "And then I'm the one that they pulled out because … [they] knew that I would not sign on board with any of these questionable dealings on the gun-running deal."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mexico-guns-20110308,0,6312372,print.story

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Obama to resume military trials for Guantanamo detainees

The decision is a sign of difficulty Obama is having keeping a campaign promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

by Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

March 8, 2011

Reporting from Washington

The Obama administration is resuming military trials for terrorism suspects detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — another step back from Obama's 2008 campaign promise to close the prison.

The president also announced Monday that he was setting new review guidelines for the prisoners that he said would "broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees" — all signals that the White House does not foresee the facility being closed any time soon.

At the start of his presidency in January 2009, Obama banned filing new military tribunal charges against Guantanamo Bay prisoners, a move praised by human rights organizations, who said the conditions at the facility and the military commissions there were a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But subsequent congressional actions blocked funds for transferring detainees to civilian federal courts, in effect preventing the White House from mothballing the prison.

With 170 detainees still at Guantanamo and more terrorism suspects likely to be captured and sent there, pressure was building for new military prosecutions. "We can expect to see a new round of charges come out real soon, possibly in days or weeks," one administration official said.

Obama left open the possibility that some of the detainees would still be transferred to federal courts, where the proceedings would be more open and the prisoners would receive civilian legal protections.

"I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates," Obama said. "And we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system … to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened."

Administration sources said that the executive order would provide Guantanamo detainees with more periodic reviews and other provisions to evaluate their cases, determine how many are committed to fighting the United States, and help safeguard their rights while in military custody.

Legal groups usually supportive of the president were highly critical Monday.

"With the stroke of a pen," said Tom Parker of Amnesty International, "President Obama extinguished any lingering hope that his administration would return the United States to the rule of law by referring detainee cases from Guantanamo Bay to federal courts rather than the widely discredited military commissions."

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said "providing more process to Guantanamo detainees is just window dressing for the reality that today's executive order institutionalized indefinite detention, which is unlawful, unwise and un-American."

"Do I think it's going to close anytime soon? No," said Mason Clutter, policy counsel for the Constitution Project, a bipartisan group that has called for shutting the prison. "Is that the administration's fault? Partly. But Congress is to blame here too. They've pretty much tied his hands in fulfilling that promise."

Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he welcomed Obama's decision to start bringing new charges against Guantanamo Bay inmates. But he said he was "extremely disappointed" over the administration's continued desire to try some of them in federal courts.

"The administration still doesn't get it and continues to ignore the will of Congress and the American people," Grassley said. "It's time to end this unwise policy and keep 'enemy combatants' off U.S. soil once and for all."

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Monday that the congressional obstacles had been "unwisely sought" and added that "we oppose those restrictions, and will continue to seek their repeal."

Holder had decided in 2009 to move high-ranking Al Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other suspects in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from Guantanamo Bay to New York City for trial. That sparked widespread outrage among Republicans and Democrats. It damaged momentum for closing the prison, and forced the administration to reconsider where to try the high-value terrorism detainees. No decision has been announced on where Mohammed will be tried.

Holder said Monday that for those behind bars in Guantanamo Bay, "we will continue to work, along with the Department of Defense, to ensure that justice is done as swiftly as possible."

And yet last week, in testimony before a House subcommittee, he reiterated the president's desire to close the prison. "Guantanamo serves as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda," he said. "All of the intelligence tells us that."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-guantanamo-20110308,0,2405393,print.story

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Serial killer Rodney Alcala linked to unsolved 1977 slaying

Investigators in the Bay Area believe they've linked the unsolved 1977 slaying of a young woman to convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala.

Pamela Jean Lambson, 19, went missing in 1977 after a trip to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco to meet with a man who'd offered to photograph her. According to her mother, Jean Lambson, her daughter met the long unidentified photographer at an Oakland A's baseball game, where he gave the teen his business card.

Her body was found soon after near a Marin County trail. For more than 30 years, her killing went unsolved until last year, when Marin County sheriff's investigators reopened the case after getting word from authorities in Southern California about the prosecution of Alcala.

Alcala, a self-styled playboy who once appeared on "The Dating Game" and was described by one detective as a "killing machine," spent much of the 1970s eluding police by changing identities and locales. He was arrested in 1979 in connection with the slaying of a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl.

Twice he was sent to death row for Robin Samsoe's murder, but both convictions were overturned on appeal. Last year he was convicted again for that killing and for the murder of four women in Los Angeles County. In January, investigators in New York said they believed he was linked to two other killings.

Lt. Barry Heying with the Marin County Sheriff's Department said Alcala's slayings matched the profile of Lambson's death -- and a decades-old police sketch from Fisherman's Wharf "matched Alcala to a T."

DNA evidence from Lambson's killing was no longer usable and no fingerprints were recovered, Heying said, so prosecuting Alcala won't be possible. However, he said that after reviewing evidence gathered by investigators in Southern California, they're "confident" Alcala killed Lambson.

The link was first reported by The Orange County Register.

In an interview Monday, Lambson's mother said she was relieved to hear the man believed to be responsible for her daughter's killing was behind bars "where he can't hurt any other young women."

"This kind of thing doesn't just hurt the young woman, but it cripples their family, such a terrible thing to happen to a family who's close," said 78-year-old Jean Lambson, who now lives in Utah. "I forgave the man a long time ago not knowing who he was, and that's where I got my closure. You can't really exist properly with anger and hate and resentment in your heart."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/serial-killer-rodney-alcala-linked-to-unsolved-1977-slaying.html

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California foster-care system: Secrecy that hurts kids

Assemblyman Mike Feuer of Los Angeles has introduced a bill to open California's dependency courts to the public.

by Jim Newton

March 8, 2011

In California today, 60,000 children are wards of the state's foster-care system. They have been abused or neglected by their parents or guardians, and foster care is intended to be a crucial lifeline.

Instead, kids thrown into the maw of a well-meaning but often callous bureaucracy continue to suffer. Some die or are abused. They are three times more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from a four-year college. And their fates are controlled by officials who take them from their homes, assign them to new ones and reunite them with parents who brutalized them — all in secret.

The tragic confluence of family abuse and official negligence, hidden from the public by a culture of secrecy, has persisted for years despite pleading by advocates inside and outside the system. Thankfully, it may soon change.

Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), one of the state's most conscientious legislators, has introduced a bill to open the state's dependency courts, where these cases are heard, to the public.

His proposal got its first public airing last week at a remarkable hearing in Sacramento in which witness after witness testified to a broken system. Judges handle the cases of 700 children at any one time. Lawyers consult with their clients in court but otherwise barely know them. Social workers — some expert and experienced, others new and unprepared — make decisions of life-wrenching significance: where a child lives, whether she can see her parents, where she should go to school. The typical dependency hearing, in which those issues are debated and resolved, lasts a mere 12 minutes.

One of those who testified at Feuer's hearing, which I watched after the fact on a DVD, was Jonathan Colon, a 17-year-old boy who was placed in foster care when he was 15. He described being yanked from school without warning one afternoon and shipped to a new home two hours away. He lost his school credits and his job. His lawyer, Colon said, never spoke to him outside court. "It weighs on you after a while," he told the committee.

"Foster kids don't have a union," testified one witness, Ed Howard, from the Children's Advocacy Institute. "They don't have a Chamber of Commerce. They can't vote. They don't have PACs. They aren't hiring PR firms. They don't do grass-tops or grass-roots organizing." And they suffer as a result. "Most everything bad that happens to them," Howard added, "happens to them in secret."

Under Feuer's proposal, the privacy of children could still be protected. The bill would simply change dependency courts from being presumptively closed to being presumptively open. Judges could, as they do in adult criminal courts, close some proceedings — those, for instance, in which children might be asked to testify about abuse — or take other measures to protect children.

The choice is not between embarrassing children or protecting them; it is between holding the system accountable and cloaking it in secrecy. The problem is not inquiring journalists or other observers; it is abusive parents and neglectful officials who take over the lives of these children and then fail them.

Experience proves this point. Dependency hearings across the country once were routinely held in secret. Now, two states hold entirely open hearings, and 18 more are presumptively open. No state that has opened its hearings has gone back to closed ones.

Among those who worry most about opening these proceedings are social workers and their union. At Feuer's hearing, it fell to David Green, a Los Angeles County social worker and member of the SEIU local, to make labor's case. He was careful not to oppose the bill but rather to seek safeguards in it, and that's defensible enough. But, he added, "our primary goal should be to ensure that this sort of information [names, addresses, details of abuse] is not made public." That's precisely wrong. The "primary goal" has to be to salvage the lives of children, and privacy is often what's hurting kids. No one is proposing publishing material that violates the privacy of children. But secrecy has led to a lack of accountability, and that's a huge threat to these children today.

Judge Michael Nash, the presiding judge of the juvenile courts for Los Angeles County, was among the last to testify at Feuer's hearing. For years, Nash has pressed for the kind of bill that Feuer has proposed, knowing well that opening proceedings would subject him and his colleagues to greater public scrutiny. It is testament to Nash's character and convictions that he has done so anyway.

Last week, he made his case yet again. The harm being done to children, he explained, comes not from the media or exposure. To the contrary, it comes from "people close to them" and from "a system that hasn't properly and doesn't properly serve a great number of them."

Feuer's bill is still a work in progress, but it may be the most important social legislation that the Legislature considers this year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-newton-column-foster-care-20110308,0,4325249,print.column

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From the New York Times

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Russia Faces 3-Year Race to Secure Site of Olympics

SOCHI, Russia — Less than 250 miles separate the skating arenas being built here for the 2014 Winter Olympics and the home of a suicide bomber who killed 37 people at a Moscow airport in January. A little farther on is Chechnya, site of two civil wars and a still seething Muslim insurgency. In a neighboring region, three tourists on a ski trip were shot to death recently, and local resorts were closed as soldiers searched in vain for the assailants.

The host nations for the Olympic Games inevitably worry about terrorism. But a glimpse at a map shows why the 2014 Winter Olympics, to be held in this Russian resort on the Black Sea, seem to be facing security concerns unlike any Games in recent memory.

Sochi lies at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, the same region that since the Soviet collapse two decades ago has yielded so much turmoil in Russia. In fact, skiing events will be held on those mountains, albeit to the west of the majority-Muslim provinces that have spawned extremist groups.

It is not only internal strife. The city of Sochi directly abuts Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions of Georgia that set off a brief war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. (The Olympic Park itself is only about five miles from the border.)

Abkhazia has declared its independence, with staunch support from Russia and its military, and senior Georgian officials have responded by calling for a boycott of the Olympics.

International Olympic Committee officials have expressed confidence in Russia's ability to ensure that the Games are safe, even as fears have risen sharply in recent weeks with a spate of attacks.

The Russian government has repeatedly stressed that it is devoting enormous amounts of money and resources to Olympic security. Senior Russian officials say they have many years of experience in killing, detaining, or, at a minimum, bottling up Muslim militants in the Caucasus.

In an interview, a deputy prime minister, Dmitri N. Kozak, acknowledged that such groups would be likely to try to step up their activities as the Olympics drew closer. But he played down the significance of Sochi's location, saying that the terrain was so difficult to traverse that it was easier to travel by plane from Moscow — about 850 miles — than over land from Chechnya.

“Concerning geography, I would say that it is an illusion that there is more access to Sochi for terrorists,” Mr. Kozak said. “Sochi is isolated from the rest of the Caucasus — Chechnya and other such regions — by mountains that are not easily passable.”

He said the Sochi Olympics would be a target for extremist groups around the world, not just those from the Caucasus. “Today, distance for terrorist organizations does not have much meaning,” he said.

Yet, the Jan. 24 suicide bomb attack at the international arrivals terminal in Moscow's showcase Domodedovo Airport seems to be weighing heavily on Olympic preparations, having raised fears that Muslim extremists from the Caucasus are turning their attention to foreigners in order to damage Russia's image around the world.

Soon after, the governor of the region around Sochi, Aleksandr N. Tkachev, called a public meeting to upbraid local officials for not doing enough to safeguard Olympic sites during construction, especially in light of the airport attack. He said reports from intelligence officials and investigators painted “an extremely disturbing picture.”

“If we do not build a solid wall of security, not only for the athletes and guests at the Olympics, but also for Sochi residents, then we risk losing everything,” Mr. Tkachev said. “But for now, unfortunately, there is an enormous distance between what must be and the current reality.”

The mood darkened even more on Feb. 18, when three tourists from Moscow who were on a ski trip to Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, were gunned down by people suspected of being Muslim extremists who pulled over their vehicle.

“A serious danger now exists for Sochi,” said Vadim M. Mukhanov, an analyst at the Center for Caucasus Studies in Moscow. “If before, the goal of the radical Islamic underground was to attack the police and security services, recently their slant has changed, and they have started going after tourists. And that is a very disturbing trend.”

The rising tensions in the Caucasus are also threatening to spill into the international arena. A senior Russian lawmaker, Aleksandr P. Torshin, last week accused Georgia of organizing the Domodedovo bombing, though he did not provide any proof. The actual bomber was a 20-year-old from a village in Ingushetia, a region next to Chechnya.

Mr. Torshin maintained that Georgia, under President Mikheil Saakashvili, wanted to foment instability in Russia. Other officials have gone further and insisted that Mr. Saakashvili hopes to turn the Olympics into a public relations disaster for Russia.

Georgian officials have called such charges ludicrous.

In Sochi late last month, the Russian government sought to demonstrate that it was heeding warnings about possible increased terrorist activity. At the Olympic Park, security officials used metal detectors to screen all workers and visitors. Trucks and other heavy equipment were searched and tagged with global positioning devices when they entered the site so they could be monitored.

At the skiing areas in nearby Krasnaya Polyana, the FIS European Cup was conducting test skiing events. Police officers were stationed throughout the slopes, with some even guarding pylons that held aloft the cables for ski lifts. Competitors and spectators were required to wear badges and had to go through checkpoints. The races occurred without incident.

Throughout Sochi, the municipal government has installed thousands of video cameras so that it can respond more quickly to security problems. One of the city officials who oversee the system, Iles P. Dzaurov, just returned from London, host of the 2012 Summer Olympics, where he observed the security precautions there.

Standing before a bank of giant video screens with feeds from across the city, Mr. Dzaurov said he understood why people were nervous. But he contended that the city would be ready.

“There are no grounds for concern,” he said. “We are on guard for anything that occurs, and we have a lot of experience doing this.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/world/europe/08sochi.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Absent Police Chief Is Fired in Mexico, Ending an Experiment

MEXICO CITY — An experiment in law enforcement in a drug-ravaged border town ended Monday when the 20-year-old police chief was fired after failing to turn up for work.

The police chief, Marisol Valles García, a college criminology student, had been hired in October after nobody else would take the job. To avoid provoking the drug gangs warring for control of the area, she did not carry a gun or wear a uniform, and made it clear that she would leave major crimes to higher authorities.

Last week, she had asked for a three-day leave to care for her baby son, and there was speculation that she had been threatened. But when she did not show up for work on Monday, the mayor of Práxedis G. Guerrero, a small town near Ciudad Juárez, fired her.

Nobody knows for certain where she is, or whether there she had been threatened.

Andrés Morales Arreola, the municipal secretary, said she appeared to have left town with her family.

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a state human rights ombudsman, said a witness saw her safely cross a bridge into El Paso last week. But noting the threats law enforcement officials face — a previous police chief had been beheaded — he criticized the mayor for “an act of abandonment.”

Town officials, however, were not alarmed.

“We're confident that she is safe in some place,” Mr. Morales said. “If there were some kind of situation, we would have known about it. That kind of news just flies.”

In its statement, the mayor's office said it “wished her the best in any future projects she may take on.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message

FORT WORTH — Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd with a loud Texas “Yee-HAW,” then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churches, synagogues and conference rooms across the United States:

As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn southern Lebanon in the 1970s, Ms. Gabriel said, she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the United States, only to find that the Islamic radicals who had terrorized her in Lebanon, she said, were now bent on taking over America.

“America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America,” she said. “They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.”

Through her books, media appearances and speeches, and her organization, ACT! for America, Ms. Gabriel has become one of the most visible personalities on a circuit of self-appointed terrorism detectors who warn that Muslims pose an enormous danger within United States borders.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of Long Island, will conduct hearings Thursday in Washington on a similar theme: that the United States is infiltrated by Muslim radicals. Mr. King was the first guest last month on a new cable television show that Ms. Gabriel co-hosts with Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT! and a Republican consultant who helped build the Christian Coalition, once the most potent political organization on the Christian right.

Ms. Gabriel, 46, who uses a pseudonym, casts her organization as a nonpartisan, nonreligious national security group. Yet the organization draws on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans.

She presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion. She has found a receptive audience among Americans who are legitimately worried about the spread of terrorism.

But some of those who work in counterterrorism say that speakers like Ms. Gabriel are spreading distortion and fear, and are doing the country a disservice by failing to make distinctions between Muslims who are potentially dangerous and those who are not.

Brian Fishman, a research fellow at both the New America Foundation in Washington, and the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said, “When you've got folks who are looking for the worst in Islam and are promoting that as the entire religion of 1.5 or 1.6 billion people, then you only empower the real extremists.”

Ms. Gabriel is only one voice in a growing circuit that includes counter-Islam speakers like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Walid Shoebat. What distinguishes Ms. Gabriel from her counterparts is that she has built a national grass-roots organization in the last three years that has already engaged in dozens of battles over the place of Islam in the United States. ACT! for America claims 155,000 members in 500 chapters across the country. To build her organization, Ms. Gabriel has enlisted Mr. Rodgers, who had worked behind the scenes for the Christian Coalition's leaders, Ralph Reed and the television evangelist Pat Robertson. (Ms. Gabriel herself was once an anchor for Mr. Robertson's Christian television network in the Middle East).

As national field director, Mr. Rodgers planted and tended Christian Coalition chapters across the country, and is now using some of the same strategies as executive director of ACT! Among those tactics is creating “nonpartisan voter guides” that rank candidates' responses and votes on issues important to the group.

Just as with the Christian Coalition's voter guides, the candidates whose positions most often align with ACT!'s are usually Republicans. Mr. Rodgers previously served as campaign manager for Patrick J. Buchanan 's presidential run in 1996, and as a consultant for John McCain in 2008.

Ms. Gabriel and Mr. Rodgers declined to be interviewed in person or over the telephone, but agreed to respond to questions by e-mail. They permitted interviews with only their national field director and two chapter leaders they selected, though half a dozen other interviews were conducted with chapter leaders before they were told not to talk.

Ms. Gabriel says she is motivated not by fear or hatred of Islam, but by her love for her adopted country.

“I lost Lebanon, my country of birth, to radical Islam,” she wrote. “I do not want to lose my adopted country America.”

She insists that she is singling out only “radical Islam” or Muslim “extremists” — not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression. She puts it most simply in the 2008 introduction to her first book, “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.”

“In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream,” she wrote. She said that there is a “cancer” infecting the world, and said: “The cancer is called Islamofacism. This ideology is coming out of one source: The Koran.”

In what ACT! is calling “Open a Koran” day this September, the group plans to put up 750 tables in front of post offices, libraries, churches and synagogues and hand out leaflets selectively highlighting verses that appear to advocate violence, slavery and subjugation of women.

In the last year, the group played a key role in passing a constitutional amendment in Oklahoma banning the use of Shariah, a body of Islamic law derived from the Koran and from the Muslim prophet Muhammad's teachings, sayings and acts. Most Muslims draw selectively on its tenets — in the same way that people of other faiths pick and choose from their sacred texts.

But group members and their allies have succeeded in popularizing the notion that American Muslims are just biding their time until they gain the power to revoke the Constitution and impose Shariah law in the United States.

“We can't let Shariah law take hold,” said Susan Watts, who leads a large chapter in Houston.

ACT! members are challenging high school textbooks and college courses that they deem too sympathetic to Islam. A group leader in Eugene, Ore., signed up to teach a community college course on Islam, but it was canceled when a Muslim group exposed his blog postings denouncing Islam and denying the scope of the Holocaust.

A chapter in Colorado recently featured a guest speaker on “How to minister to Muslims,” and “Conversion success stories.” Mr. Rodgers said in a written response that ACT! does not encourage such activities.

Ms. Gabriel's approach and her power appear rooted in her childhood trauma in the civil war in southern Lebanon. The war was a chaotic stew in which ever-shifting alliances of clan-based militias made up of Christian, Shiite, Sunni, Palestinian and Druse made war on one other, often with the backing of other countries. But in the rendering Ms. Gabriel shares with her American audiences, it was black and white. As her father explained to her, “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” (The refrain became the title of her first book.)

She moved to Israel in her early 20s to work for Middle East Television. Ms. Gabriel often mentions in lectures that she was an anchor for the network, but does not reveal that Middle East Television was then run by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East.

On air as a reporter, Ms. Gabriel used the name Nour Saman. She married an American co-worker and in 1989 moved to the United States. They started a film and television production company, which says it has produced programs on terrorism for “Good Morning America” and “Primetime.”

She said she uses a pseudonym, voted on by her organization's board, because she has received death threats.

Ms. Gabriel has given hundreds of lectures, including to the Heritage Foundation and the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. Her salary from two organizations she founded, American Congress for Truth and ACT! for America, was $178,411 in 2009. And the group's combined income was $1.6 million.

In Fort Worth, Ms. Gabriel spent nearly an hour after her speech signing books and posing for pictures with gushing fans.

“She really opened up my eyes about Islam,” said Natalie Rix Cresson, a composer, clutching a signed copy of Ms. Gabriel's book. “I didn't realize it was so infiltrated in the schools, everywhere.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08gabriel.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Justices Allow Inmates to Sue for DNA Testing

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for inmates to sue for access to DNA evidence that could prove their innocence.

The legal issue in the case was tightly focused and quite preliminary: Was Hank Skinner, a death row inmate in Texas, entitled to sue a prosecutor there under a federal civil rights law for refusing to allow testing of DNA evidence? By a 6-to-3 vote, the court said yes, rejecting a line of lower-court decisions that had said the only proper procedural route for such challenges was a petition for habeas corpus.

In her opinion for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized the narrowness of the ruling. Allowing Mr. Skinner to sue, she said, was not the same thing as saying he should win his suit.

Justice Ginsburg added that a 2009 decision, District Attorney's Office v. Osborne, had severely limited the kinds of claims prisoners seeking DNA evidence can make. The Osborne decision, she wrote, “left slim room for the prisoner to show that the governing state law denies him procedural due process.”

The case decided Monday, Skinner v. Switzer, No. 09-9000, arose from three killings on New Year's Eve in 1993. Mr. Skinner contends that he was asleep on a sofa in a vodka-and-codeine haze when his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two sons were killed that night. Mr. Skinner says that an uncle of Ms. Busby, Robert Donnell, who has since died, was the likely killer.

Prosecutors tested some but not all of the evidence from the crime scene. Some of it pointed toward Mr. Skinner, who never denied that he was present, but some did not. His trial lawyer, wary of what additional testing might show, did not ask for it.

In the years since, prosecutors have blocked Mr. Skinner's requests to test blood, fingernail scrapings and hair found at the scene. In their Supreme Court briefs, prosecutors accused Mr. Skinner of playing games with the system, dragging out his case and seeking to impose unacceptable burdens on government resources and the victims' dignity. They added that testing would be pointless because “no item of evidence exists that would conclusively prove that Skinner did not commit the murder.”

In 2001, Texas enacted a law allowing post-conviction DNA testing in limited circumstances. State courts in Texas rejected Mr. Skinner's requests under the law, saying he was at fault for not having sought testing earlier.

Mr. Skinner then sued in federal court under a federal civil rights law known as Section 1983, saying the Texas law violated his right to due process. That suit was rejected in the lower federal courts on the ground that the proper vehicle for a challenge was a petition for habeas corpus.

Section 1983 suits are often more attractive to prisoners than habeas petitions because Congress and the Supreme Court have placed significant barriers in the path of inmates seeking habeas corpus.

Justice Ginsburg wrote that a Section 1983 suit was available in cases where the relief sought by the inmate would not “necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence.” Since there was no telling whether the results of the tests Mr. Skinner sought would establish his guilt, clear him or be inconclusive, she wrote, the suit was proper.

But habeas petitions are appropriate, she wrote, where inmates seek “immediate or speedier release from confinement.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr., dissented. Justice Thomas predicted that Monday's ruling would flood the courts with civil rights suits. “What prisoner would not avail himself of this additional bite at the apple?” Justice Thomas asked.

Justice Ginsburg responded that that the decision was unlikely to prompt “any litigation flood or even rainfall.”

In a second decision on Monday, the court made it harder for the government to withhold some kinds of records under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act concerning personnel records. In an 8-to-1 decision, the court rejected a longstanding broad interpretation of the exemption in the lower courts.

The exemption has been used, according to Justice Breyer's dissent, to shield blueprints of government buildings, information about NASA computers, credit card numbers used by federal agencies and security plans for the Supreme Court.

In the case decided Monday, Milner v. Department of the Navy, No. 09-1163, the Navy had relied on the exemption to reject a request for maps showing where it stores explosives on a naval base in Puget Sound in Washington State.

Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, focused on the text of the exemption, which allows the government to withhold records “related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.” She said the common interpretation of the exemption to cover records about things government personnel are instructed to do could not be reconciled with the ordinary meaning of the “12 simple words” at issue and particularly “the key word in that dozen” — “personnel.”

Justice Kagan used reasoning similar to that in last week's decision in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, which looked to ordinary usage to interpret the phrase “personal privacy” in a different FOIA exemption. Here, Justice Kagan wrote, “personnel” is commonly used to refer to “human resources matters” like pay, pensions, lunch hours and parking.

Justice Kagan wrote that the government might be able to protect the Navy records and similar information through other FOIA exemptions, including ones concerning classified materials and law enforcement records. “If these or other exemptions do not cover records whose release would threaten the nation's vital interests,” she added, “the government may of course seek relief from Congress.”

In his dissent, Justice Breyer wrote that there was no reason to disturb a “decades-long status quo” concerning the reach of the exemption. “I would let sleeping legal dogs lie,” he wrote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08scotus.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Flailing After Muslims

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

“There is a real threat to the country from the Muslim community,” he said, “and the only way to get to the bottom of it is to investigate what is happening.”

That kind of sweeping statement from a major government official about a religious minority — soon to be backed up by the intimidating aura of Congressional hearings — can only serve to further demonize a group of Americans already being pummeled by bigotry and vicious stereotyping.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, the president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, was among some 500 people at a rally in Times Square on Sunday that was called to protest Mr. King's hearings. “To single out Muslim-Americans as the source of homegrown terrorism,” he said, “and not examine all forms of violence motivated by extremist belief — that, my friends, is an injustice.”

To focus an investigative spotlight on an entire religious or ethnic community is a violation of everything America is supposed to stand for. But that does not seem to concern Mr. King. “The threat is coming from the Muslim community,” he told The Times. “The radicalization attempts are directed at the Muslim community. Why should I investigate other communities?”

The great danger of these hearings, in addition to undermining fundamental American values, is that for no good reason — nearly a decade after the terrible attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — they will intensify the already overheated anti-Muslim feeling in the U.S. There is nothing wrong with the relentless investigation of terrorism. That's essential. But that is not the same as singling out, stereotyping and harassing an entire community.

On Monday, I spoke by phone with Colleen Kelly, a nurse practitioner from the Bronx whose brother, William Kelly Jr., was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. She belongs to a group called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and is opposed to Mr. King's hearings. “I was trying to figure out why he's doing this,” she said, “and I haven't come up with a good answer.”

She recalled how people were stigmatized in the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the way that stigmas become the focus of attention and get in the way of the efforts really needed to avert tragedy.

Mr. King's contention that Muslims are not cooperating with law enforcement is just wrong. According to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, an independent research group affiliated with Duke University and the University of North Carolina, 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, were turned in by fellow Muslims. In some cases, they were turned in by parents or other relatives.

What are we doing? Do we want to demonize innocent people and trample on America's precious freedom of religion? Or do we want to stop terrorism? There is no real rhyme or reason to Congressman King's incoherent flailing after Muslims. Witch hunts, after all, are about seeing what kind of ugliness might fortuitously turn up.

Mr. King was able to concoct the anti-Muslim ugliness in his 2004 novel, “Vale of Tears,” in which New York is hit yet again by terrorists and, surprise, the hero of the piece is a congressman from Long Island. But this is real life, and the congressman's fantasies should not apply.

America should be better than this. We've had all the requisite lessons: Joe McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the demonization of blacks and Jews, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and on and on and on. It's such a tired and ugly refrain.

When I asked Colleen Kelly why she spoke up, she said it was because of her great love for her country. “I love being an American, and I really try to be thankful for all the gifts that come with that,” she said. But with gifts and privileges come responsibilities. The planned hearings into the Muslim community struck Ms. Kelly as something too far outside “the basic principles that I knew and felt to be important to me as a citizen of this country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08herbert.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Peter King's Obsession

Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims. Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group's methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.

Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn't seem to be Mr. King's real interest.

Instead, he is focusing on one group that appears to have obsessed him since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in slanders and misstatements that might have earned him a rebuke from his colleagues had they been about any other group. More than 80 percent of the mosques in America are run by extremists, he has said, never citing real evidence. Too many American Muslims are sympathetic to radical Islam, he said.

Most pernicious, he has claimed that American Muslims have generally refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on terrorism cases. He has cited no evidence for this, either, but a study issued last month by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found just the opposite. The American Muslim community has been the single largest source of tips that have brought terror suspects to the attention of authorities, the study found. (It also found that the number of American Muslims found or suspected to be part of terror operations dropped substantially in 2010.)

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has written to Mr. King pleading with him to postpone or reframe the hearings. It said his single-minded pursuit “will inevitably stoke anti-Muslim sentiment and increase suspicion and fear.” Terrorists should be identified by behavior, not religion or ethnicity, the group said. All of that has been dismissed as political correctness by Mr. King. Fortunately, he has not seemed to gather much enthusiasm from his fellow Republican leaders.

Denis McDonough, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, aimed a speech directly at Mr. King on Sunday when he said at a Virginia mosque that this nation does not practice guilt by association. An unrepentant Mr. King later told The Times that there is no need to investigate any other group.

Mr. King plans to call as witnesses two family members of Muslims linked to terror groups, as well as Zuhdi Jasser, the leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Republican who has echoed Mr. King's suspicions. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota who is one of two Muslims in Congress, is also scheduled to testify, though he opposes the hearings.

Democrats on the committee plan to call Leroy Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who has often said that American Muslims have been crucial in helping terrorism investigations. But that involves empirical facts and expert observation. Nothing could be further from the real purpose of Mr. King's show trial.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08tue1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Father: I will kill my 5-year-old son's murderer

Plea bargain deal could allow to be released early for good behavior

The father of a five-year-old boy slain in 1975 has vowed to murder the man who did it "as aggressively and painfully as he killed my son" if he is released from prison early.

John Foreman told WPRO-AM radio that he blamed himself for accepting a plea deal that saw Michael Woodmansee convicted of the second-degree murder of his son Jason in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

Woodmansee was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1982, but the plea bargain deal allowed him to be released early for good behavior. This could happen as soon as August, the Providence Journal reported.

"I do intend, if this man is released anywhere in my vicinity, or if I can find him after the fact, I do intend to kill this man," Foreman added.

"I cannot think, I cannot sleep. All I think about is trying to find a way to get this man to kill him," he told WPRO-AM.

Foreman said he wanted to kill Woodmansee "as aggressively and painfully as he killed my son."

In the interview, Foreman said his decision to accept a plea deal had been "spineless."

"I've got myself to blame for that ... allowing him to be released early to become a predator to someone else. I'm to blame for all that and I'll make that right," he said.

Foreman said his son was a "well-behaved boy, very smart, very intelligent for his age."

He added that he had been full of "hopes and dreams" for his son. "I know he was going to be somebody. I had real hopes for this young boy," Foreman said.

Amy Kempe, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, said in a statement Monday that he was concerned and outraged about Woodmansee's scheduled release, The Associated Press reported.

Kempe said Kilmartin had asked Rhode Island's Department of Corrections to look into ways to keep Woodmansee in prison.

Kempe added that the attorney general's office would work with the Department of Corrections to examine the legal options.

Patricia Coyne-Fague, chief legal counsel for the Department of Corrections, said that the only way an inmate could lose his entitlement to early release for good behavior was if he did something wrong.

Coyne-Fague said the early release was based on a law first introduced in 1872. It was last changed significantly in 1960.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41963513/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

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Demeanor of rape suspect surprises detectives

The detectives who had been hunting the East Coast Rapist for 14 years finally walked into an interview room in Connecticut to confront their suspect late last week. They were ready to face a combative, ruthless predator.

What they found instead was a mild, passive, talkative and even weak man, according to several law enforcement officials. Serial rape suspect Aaron H. Thomas talked about "uncontrollable urges" that he said led him to commit the crimes but did not indicate any sense of responsibility for more than a dozen attacks allegedly linked to him by DNA he left behind, the officials said.

He told detectives he had been following media coverage of the case and suspected police were closing in. After his arrest Friday in New Haven, Conn., a prosecutor said in court, Thomas had asked, "Why haven't you picked me up sooner?"

"You're expecting this big confrontation," said Mark Pfeiffer, a Fairfax County detective who began working on the case in 1999 and interviewed Thomas after his arrest. "You always try to envision what he's going to be like. Then you see this weak person."

Thomas, 39, an out-of-work truck driver with ties to the Washington area, appears to have had few close relationships in his life, detectives said. Much about him remains unknown, but he was living with a girlfriend in Connecticut, has a young child and often visited family in Virginia.

Police say they have used DNA to link Thomas to 12 rapes and other attacks on women since 1997. The crimes spanned four states, including Virginia and Maryland. Most of the assaults occurred within a few miles of where Thomas lived at different points in his life.

Detectives said they think that Thomas could be responsible for many more attacks, including some that were never reported.

Authorities said Monday that they are tracing Thomas's travels during the past 14 years and examining records from Vermont to Georgia, where he is known to have worked as a long-haul trucker and deliveryman.

A combination of old-fashioned detective work, a high-tech police database culling millions of records and a tip from someone who knew Thomas in Prince George's County led to his arrest and could unveil more crimes.

"There's no doubt that an offender like this will have twice as many [victims] as he is usually linked to," said Fairfax Detective John Kelly, who led the task force that hunted the rapist. "Obviously, he didn't have boundaries in his crimes."

On Monday, Fairfax Police Chief David M. Rohrer and other law enforcement officials asked those who know Thomas, or women who might have been victimized by him, to contact them.

"We are still seeking information about Mr. Thomas and any victims who wish to come forward," Rohrer said. But police did not release a photograph of Thomas, citing ongoing investigative efforts in Connecticut.

Prince George's Capt. Michael Straughan said the arrest is hardly the end of the case. Detectives will try to determine whether there are unsolved attacks that could be linked to Thomas. "We have a lot more work to do," Straughan said.

Detectives described Thomas as more slight and less menacing than they had expected - he is listed in court documents as being 5-foot-6 and weighing 175 pounds. But they noted that the East Coast Rapist surprised his victims and used a weapon. And police said he probably changed his appearance numerous times over the past decade and a half.

They said Thomas was keenly aware of media coverage of the East Coast Rapist and left Northern Virginia for New England sometime last year after reading an investigative report in The Washington Post that detailed the series of crimes. The most recent rape attributed to Thomas was on Halloween in 2009, when three teenage trick-or-treaters were forced into a woods in Prince William County and two of them were sexually assaulted.

Police also said Thomas had visited www.eastcoastrapist.com, a Web site they launched last week.

They said he felt the pressure as police closed in. "He was tired of being on the run," said Fairfax 2nd Lt. Bryan Holland.

Kelly said Thomas told authorities that he worried years ago that he would be arrested when police released a composite sketch made after two teenage girls were attacked in Prince George's in 1998. Thomas, who grew up in Prince George's, had an address near the attack.

"He thought it was only a matter of time. He thought somebody would make the connection," Kelly said.

Nonetheless, the attacks continued. Detectives said Thomas purposefully changed his methods, including using a fake Caribbean accent and a variety of weapons.

Law enforcement officials scoffed at the idea that Thomas had sudden "urges" to commit the crimes. They said it appears the East Coast Rapist carefully scoped out locations and, in some cases, specific victims. Prince William Commonwealth's Attorney Paul B. Ebert said that the crimes were carried out with intent and that Thomas stalked his victims.

It wasn't until last week, when police launched a massive media campaign that included highway billboards and a Web site devoted to the case, that someone who knew Thomas called in a tip. That tip, police said, came through Prince George's Crime Solvers and could lead to a $25,000 reward.

The tipster said Thomas had admitted to committing an attack in Forestville and said he had been riding a bicycle when he attacked, according to court papers filed in Connecticut.

Detectives said some victims were elated to learn that a suspect had been arrested, and others were overcome by emotion at the prospect of putting a face and name to the man who changed the course of their lives.

"Those victims and what they endured is not lost on us. We were awake at night trying to find another way to go at this guy," said Fairfax Detective Paul O'Neill. "Catching this guy doesn't take away happened to these women."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/07/AR2011030704901.html?hpid=top

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