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From Los Angeles Times

In Mexico City, crowds protest drug violence

Tens of thousands descend on downtown with placards saying 'No more blood!' and 'We're fed up!' More than 34,000 have died since President Felipe Calderon began cracking down on cartels.

by Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

May 8, 2011

Reporting from Mexico City

Bearing white balloons and fake bloodstains, tens of thousands of demonstrators crowded Mexico City's historic downtown Sunday to call for an end to the country's unrelenting drug violence.

The primary target of the protest was President Felipe Calderon, who has ruled during a period of extraordinary bloodshed. More than 34,000 people have been killed since Calderon declared an all-out assault on drug cartels after taking office four and a half years ago.

Demonstrators, holding placards saying "No more blood!" and "We're fed up!", urged the conservative Calderon to drop his military-led strategy.

"Mexicans can't take more of this fear. This country is overwhelmed by violence as never before," said Maricarmen Luna, a 36-year-old teacher, as she marched toward the main plaza, or Zocalo.

Mexican media cited Mexico City police estimates of 90,000 in the plaza, though organizers put the number at more than double that.

The gathering was led by poet Javier Sicilia, whose 24-year-old son and six other people were seized and slain by gunmen in Cuernavaca in March. Since then, the elder Sicilia has been a frequent presence on Mexican television, criticizing Mexican leaders across party lines and labeling the drug war a failure.

Sicilia drew applause when he called for the resignation of Mexico's public safety secretary, Genaro Garcia Luna.

"No more deaths! No more hatred!" Sicilia said.

Although protests are frequent in the clamorous capital, this demonstration has dominated headlines. Mexican media tracked Sicilia and a core group of several hundred marchers who set out Thursday from the city of Cuernavaca, about 60 miles south.

By Sunday, the gathering had grown into a happening, with room for just about anyone who had a strong opinion. Along with left-leaning political activists, the crowd included peace-minded school groups, disgruntled electrical workers, advocates of women's rights, critics of neo-liberal economics, drum groups and hula-hoop dancers.

Many banners decried corruption and impunity, two of the country's most oft-cited problems. One youngster held a sign slamming "mediocre teachers." A day earlier, youths went around dumping red paint in fountains in and around downtown to symbolize the bloodshed.

Calderon is under mounting pressure as the carnage rises across Mexico. But the conservative president has said it would be irresponsible for his government to withdraw from the battle against Mexico's powerful and violent drug-trafficking organizations.

Most of the killing has resulted from fighting between rival groups, but numerous bystanders have also died in the crossfire. In addition, the military has been frequently charged with human rights abuses.

Organizers presented a manifesto calling for political reforms and changes in the crime strategy to improve the safety of ordinary Mexicans while attacking graft and impunity that allows wrongdoers to avoid punishment. Demonstrators urged the United States to stem the southbound flow of weaponry that helps arm the drug cartels.

Coordinated demonstrations were held in Washington and across Europe.

Martin Martinez, 44, a chemist, said the crisis underscored the bankruptcy of all the country's political parties. He held a sign saying, "We've had it up to here."

"It's against violence," Martinez said of the Mexico City protest, "but beyond that is a vision for real change."

Mexicans have taken to the streets before in large numbers to protest crime and insecurity, only to watch the violence rage on. But some of those taking part Sunday said the killing had reached an intolerable level.

"We know there will be more — more blood, more death. But how far does it go?" asked Yazmin Galicia, 27, a biologist, who had painted "no more blood" on her right cheek.

"This is a little grain of sand in all that we have to do."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexican-violence-protest-20110509,0,7690657,print.story

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State to double crime searches using family DNA

California's success in using 'familial searching' spurs Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to increase funding for the controversial genetic sleuthing technique in rape, murder and cold cases.

by Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times

May 9, 2011

A young man followed a woman into a coffee shop as she prepared to open for business at 6 a.m. He put a knife to her throat, sexually assaulted her, barricaded her in a walk-in refrigerator and grabbed cash from the register before vanishing.

The March 2008 attack near the Santa Cruz Harbor in a low-crime neighborhood unnerved the community and spawned an intense police hunt.

"It is the kind of attack that communities most fear — a stranger attacking somebody who truly is just an innocent victim going about their lives," said Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark.

Police dogs, fliers containing a composite sketch of the suspect and a search of the DNA offender database failed to net a suspect — until the state earlier this year traced the suspect through the DNA of his father, a felon whose genetic profile was stored in the database.

Although such genetic sleuthing, known as familial searching, remains controversial — California is one of only three states that permit the technique — Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris has increased the budget to double the number of such searches and reduce a DNA backlog.

"California is on the cutting edge of this in many ways," Harris, who replaced Jerry Brown as the state's top law enforcement officer in January, said in an interview last week. "I think we are going to be a model for the country. I really do."

California's early success with familial searching — it led to the arrest of the suspect in the Grim Sleeper serial killings last summer — has spurred calls for using the science to trace criminals nationwide. Virginia recently joined California and Colorado in permitting such searches.

Some advocates of familial searching even point to the military's identification of Osama bin Laden as evidence of the effectiveness of using DNA from relatives to determine identify.

"If the military is using indirect methods to identify Osama bin Laden, then why should it not be used to identify murderers and rapists in Kentucky?" asked Harvard geneticist Frederick Bieber, who has written papers on the scientific underpinnings of familial searches.

Civil libertarians want familial searching reserved for the most serious crimes because it puts an offender's entire family under scrutiny. The criminal database also contains a disproportionate number of DNA profiles of racial minorities, making them more likely to be captured by such searches.

Peter Bibring, staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, worries that officials might skip precautions now in place as familial searches become more routine. The American Civil Liberties Union wants those precautions, now part of a state protocol that calls for a variety of checks, codified by law so that an attorney general could not change them at will.

"If police start using this for every crime under the sun, they are not going to be as attentive to the safeguards," Bibring said.

So far, California has limited familial searches to sexual assaults and homicides. The Santa Cruz case, in which there was a single victim, sat unexamined for months.

Forensic scientists instead worked on higher-priority police requests for familial searches of serial criminals and on cold cases — old crimes that have never been solved, said Jill Spriggs, head of the state's Bureau of Forensic Services.

In announcing the nation's first comprehensive familial search policy in 2008, then-Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said the searches would be used to track rapists and killers.

The state's protocol limited the technique to crimes that stumped police, posed "critical public safety" risks and involved DNA from a single source. Mixtures of DNA from more than one person are trickier to analyze.

In interviews, state officials would not rule out using the technique to solve crimes other than rapes and slayings, nor did the officials flatly oppose enshrining the rules for such searches in a law.

But the expense of such searches is likely to limit their uses. Each now costs about $20,000, a significant amount even though the state's familiarity with the process has shaved the price.

"We want to keep it to violent crimes right now until this is litigated," Spriggs said. She noted that the state has four cases "in the hopper waiting to go."

"They are all violent crimes," she said.

No one has sued to stop familial searching, although a challenge of the state's collection of DNA from people who have been arrested but not yet convicted is pending in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The state does not permit familial searching in the arrestee database, a sign of concern that the technique could make it more legally vulnerable.

California's Justice Department receives a handful of police requests for familial searches in some months, and in others it gets none, Spriggs said. The state is working on its 18th request, she said.

Familial searching, which is done in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, has a 10% to 14% success rate, according to countries that use the technique. California's rate so far is about 11%.

Harris, California's first black attorney general, said the disproportionate number of DNA profiles from racial minorities should not deter forensic probing. She noted that most of the victims in the Grim Sleeper killings were African American women.

The suspect in that case, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., was caught because the DNA left at a crime scene partially matched the DNA of his son, whose genetic information was filed when he was convicted of a felony weapons charge.

"It's a myth to suggest that poor communities, communities of color, don't want law enforcement," Harris said. "They do."

In reshuffling funds to double the number of familial searches to two a month, Harris said she was concerned that "some of the most serious and violent cases" were not being examined quickly enough.

In the Santa Cruz case, police arrested Elvis Garcia, 21, in March after a familial search identified him as the likely suspect and a subsequent DNA test of a Gatorade bottle and a hair net in his garbage matched the genetic evidence from the crime, authorities said.

The victim in the case "has been in utter fear every day since that crime that this rapist could come and find her at any time," Harris said. "Equally bad is that every day that rapist is walking free is a day he thinks he can get away with that kind of crime."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-familial-dna-20110509,0,689994,print.story

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At Long Beach Community Garden, the spirit of sharing is growing

Southern California's community gardens differ in size, location and demographic, but you'll find one recurring trait at them all: generosity. Gardeners love to share, and in the community gardens I've visited, that best of human qualities is regularly evident -- be it an exchange of hard-to-coax seedlings to just-harvested heirlooms.

At Long Beach Community Garden, known for its stunningly high yields, all gardeners dedicate 10% of their harvest to one of five local charitable organizations. (Other community gardens also donate to food banks, but at Long Beach the giving seems to be on an entirely different level.) The biggest recipient is the Long Beach Rescue Mission, which provides three meals a day to 250 people.

“They'll take everything we can give them,” says Tracy Frate, head of the garden's food bank committee. “Winter is our best season. We have 300 plots and so we get 300 different versions of things. We just went through a season when we got every type of cabbage known to man. We used it all.”

Within reason. That doesn't mean baseball bat-sized zucchini or broccoli that has gone to flower, she says. “Once you let a zucchini get past 10 inches, it's bitter and no good even for a soup.”

Her rule of thumb: If you would feed it to your family, then it can go on the food bank table. Otherwise, it's compost. The same sensibility applies to leafy greens that have been wilting in the heat all day, harvested after the volunteer drivers have made their daily delivery.

Not all of the garden's produce recipients are so food savvy. One group is a home for young mothers-to-be.

“They're pickier and maybe don't know how to cook an artichoke or kale," Frate says. "They like green beans, carrots, tomatoes.”

Frate oversees three plots dedicated to growing food donations. One plot is filled with nothing but tomatoes and basil. On communal work days, gardeners chip in with weeding, other maintenance and harvesting.

An orchard is planted with apples, citrus, stone fruit and more -- “anything that can be grown in Southern California,” she says. That harvest goes toward the food bank as well.

“Dropping the food off, you see the people who probably are going to be eating it," she says. "These are all people we live around -- the needy, people not able to support themselves. It's giving back to the community and also to the city, because they have given us this land to grow for our own families.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/home_blog/2011/05/long-beach-community-garden.html

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Lies don't keep us safe

The government asserts national security as the reason it lied to a judge in a case about surveillance of Muslims in Southern California. But keeping us safe also requires respect for the rule of law and the Constitution.

May 9, 2011

Lying to a federal court carries a heavy price, but that didn't deter the U.S. Department of Justice from doing exactly that.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of Santa Ana revealed that the government lied to him in a case related to government surveillance of American Muslims in Southern California. The plaintiffs — including the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California and the Council on American-Islamic Relations — were seeking to obtain records that they believed would prove the FBI had been unfairly targeting Muslims in the area. Carney had asked government lawyers to provide him with all documents pertaining to the Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Muslim groups. Although the government initially provided some of the documents for the judge to review in chambers, it later admitted that it had intentionally withheld additional pages.

"The government asserts that it had to mislead the court regarding the government's response to plaintiffs' FOIA request to avoid compromising national security," Carney wrote in an 18-page ruling. "The government's argument is untenable. The government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the court."

Carney is right. There is no law that permits an individual or the government to lie to the court. To do so is to undermine due process and to prevent courts from enforcing laws. Yet for nearly a decade, the George W. Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used national security as it if were some of kind of fig leaf to cover a multitude of abuses.

We understand that the government has a duty to protect secrets that would put the country in jeopardy if revealed. There are even exemptions under FOIA that the government may claim in order to avoid releasing documents it believes could damage the country's security. But that doesn't mean the government can mislead a court about the existence of those documents.

Carney has said he will not seek sanctions against the government because he believes that though it was overzealous, it did not act in bad faith. His decision, like those of previous courts, is far too accommodating of the government's interpretation of the law. In this case, it is not even clear which statute the government was relying on because it has refused to disclose its legal reasoning. The government's decision to lie is even more absurd given that Carney never disputed that the documents in question should remain under seal.

It is hard to take seriously the Obama administration's claim that keeping Americans safe requires that the government lie to the courts and the public. Keeping us safe also requires respect for the rule of law and the Constitution.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-secrets-20110509,0,1681157,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Smugglers Guide Illegal Immigrants With Cues via Cellphone

NOGALES, Ariz. — A group of migrants was hustling north through the southern Arizona desert the other night when one of their cellphones vibrated with a text message. “Watch out,” it warned. “Things are hot up ahead. Take cover in the bushes.”

The message, signaling the presence of the Border Patrol, was sent by a smuggler watching the group's progress through binoculars from a hillside on the Mexican side of the border, members of the group said later. It was part of what border officials and immigrant activists say is an emerging trend in illegal border crossing — the use of what is being called the cybercoyote.

“I've crossed eight times, and this is the first time they've directed me with my cellphone,” said Sandra Silva, 30, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, who was on her way to Phoenix. “It's like a guide through the desert.”

Increased enforcement has made it difficult to sneak into the United States, officials say. And repeat offenders caught in the act are more often receiving stiff prison terms, making smugglers more cautious about risking arrest themselves.

Guides still accompany the bulk of the migrants crossing the border, activists and Border Patrol agents say. Those guides are in regular radio contact with confederates, who warn of trouble ahead. But the Border Patrol has been noticing cases of migrants crossing alone but in cell contact with guides, said Mario Escalante, a spokesman for the Tucson office of the Border Patrol.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Mexico; many migrants consider them essential when crossing, right up there with sturdy shoes and jugs of water.

Now, though, in addition to using cellphones to keep relatives up to date on their progress, some illegal immigrants rely on them to keep out of the reach of the authorities. Ms. Silva said that her group had no coyote with them but had received directions by text.

The messages typically come during a migrant's first hour or so of hiking north, those who used the new system said. If they make it that far, the illegal immigrants then meet up with guides on the United States side, who help them trek further north to awaiting vehicles.

Aiding the process are numerous spotters, who monitor the southern Arizona desert from lookout points and help steer the migrants, as well as drug shipments, away from the authorities.

Smugglers are constantly innovating to elude the authorities, veteran Border Patrol agents say. “They always come up with new, clever ways of trying to avoid us,” said T. J. Bonner, past president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union for agents. “This way minimizes the risk to smugglers, and you're using a technology that is relatively cheap.”

Migrants like the group of 13 that set out for Arizona on Tuesday night found that the system has serious limitations.

The group was led to a remote stretch of border in Pima County by a guide, who had jotted down their cellphone numbers and instructed them on how to configure their phones so they would switch from Telcel, the dominant Mexican carrier, to AT&T.

The migrants said the cost for crossing was anywhere from $2,000 to $3,500, with some of them paying ahead of time and others putting down a deposit and agreeing to pay the balance once they crossed.

A guide assisted them in climbing the border fence, somewhere a few miles west of Nogales, and then directed them north on a well-worn path toward Sierra Vista, Ariz., the migrants said. Periodically over the next hour, text messages would arrive directing their course.

“They tell you to turn right or left or to watch out for the perrera,” Ms. Silva said, using Spanish slang for the Border Patrol vehicle used to transport detainees.

But shortly after the last text arrived warning them of trouble ahead, they were spotted by Border Patrol agents, who took them into custody and deported them.

“We felt all alone out there,” said Maria Martinez, 51, who said she had been receiving the texts and whispering the directions to others in the group but would have preferred actually having a guide with them. “We felt like we were in God's hands.”

Cellphone coverage is notoriously spotty along the border, and Ms. Martinez's battery was nearly dead when she was interviewed a few hours after her detention, which she said made her feel vulnerable. “If you're without power or credit on your phone, you're dead,” said Ms. Martinez, who is from outside Mexico City and was en route to Oregon, where she has relatives.

To reduce the number of fatalities among border crossers, a University of San Diego professor, Ricardo Dominguez, has been developing a cellphone application to help guide illegal immigrants to water stations and other points of safety.

His project outraged three Republican members of Congress, who wrote to university officials last year condemning the research and suggesting that he may be violating the law by encouraging illegal immigration.

Already, migrants who find themselves in trouble use their phones to call for help. In one case from last year, the Border Patrol's search-and-rescue team responded to a 911 call received from a mountainous area in Southern California. From a helicopter, the authorities saw a faint light from a cellphone and were able to reach the ailing migrant, who was suffering from hypothermia and unable to walk.

Similarly, last Sunday, a woman who had been abandoned by her guide in the Arizona desert called 911 to report that she had lost track of her 9-year-old daughter. The Border Patrol first found the woman in a remote area of Pima County and then, six miles away, the girl.

Cellphones help not just migrants trying to slip across the border but also those trying to stop them.

Border Patrol agents have complained that a lack of coverage complicates their ability to communicate. On some stretches where coverage is not a problem, the Border Patrol has urged residents to report suspicious activity via text message.

After a rancher was killed along the border in 2010 in a high-profile case that remains unsolved, Representative Gabrielle Giffords pushed to improve cellphone coverage in the region. After Ms. Giffords, a Democrat, was shot on Jan. 8, a Republican colleague from Texas, Representative Ted Poe, introduced legislation she had supported to use federal grants to help beef up communications along the border.

“It was very obvious to me during my recent visit to Southern Arizona that there are too many areas where cellphones simply do not work,” Mr. Poe said in a statement in March.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/us/09coyotes.html?ref=us

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For Some, Helping With Disaster Relief Is Not Just Aid, It's a Calling

RAINSVILLE, Ala. — Some couples spend retirement playing the nation's best golf courses or hopping cruise ships. Not Marteen and Wiley Blankenship. They collect disasters the way other retirees collect passport stamps.

The minute they got the call from Southern Baptist Convention disaster relief leaders that tornadoes had ripped through the South, the Blankenships grabbed their sleeping bags and sturdy shoes and headed out from their home in Decatur, Ala.

Together, they have cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina, mucked out flooded homes in Atlanta and built houses in Sri Lanka. And for the past week they were camped out here in a rural part of northeastern Alabama where 48 lives were lost and thousands more disrupted in the storms.

Mr. Blankenship, 70, and Mrs. Blankenship, 69, heated up chili and Salisbury steak, handing it out to people who drove through a church parking lot and packing it into Red Cross vans that carry meals into the remote countryside.

And they did it all for God.

“I thought when we were done working that I wanted to travel,” said Mrs. Blankenship, a former flight attendant. “I just never thought it'd look like this. But it's our calling.”

With the ability to feed 20,000 people from one mobile kitchen, and a chain of command so tightly run it would make a military officer proud, the Southern Baptist teams are the backbone of disaster relief here.

Nearly 95,000 Baptists across the country are trained to handle disasters like hurricanes and floods. After the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, the Baptist group is the biggest disaster relief organization in the country.

“We're the best-kept secret out there,” said Ron Warren, cleanup and recovery coordinator for the Alabama Southern Baptist disaster relief group.

Of course, thousands of church members are doing their part to help the South recover from the tornadoes. They raise money, sort clothing donations and hand out water.

They are what the veterans of large faith-based relief efforts call S.U.V.'s — spontaneous untrained volunteers. The efforts are welcomed, but they have nothing on what the Southern Baptists bring to a disaster.

From an elaborate “war room” in a church building in Montgomery, Ala., to direct lines of communication with federal and local emergency agencies, the Southern Baptist disaster ministry is a model of efficiency.

Its renowned chain-saw crews were cutting fallen trees so medical crews could get to the injured in the hours after the tornadoes hit. They had an enormous mobile kitchen, complete with a hot-water heater for dishwashing and five convection ovens, set up here a day before the Red Cross arrived.

“Churches are literally, honestly, the first ones there,” said Jon Mason, director of the Alabama Governor's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The Baptist relief efforts began in earnest during Texas' hurricanes in the 1960s and became more organized in the 1980s. They and other large church disaster programs got a formal, though controversial, lift in 2001, when President George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

But when it comes to disaster relief, the link between church and state has never been stronger than during the most recent storms in the South, say federal officials and the leaders of faith-based disaster relief work.

Joshua DuBois, executive director of what is now known as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, credits David L. Myers, a Mennonite minister and the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Mr. Meyers meets regularly with government emergency officials and church leaders to discuss how best to respond to disasters.

As a result, Mr. DuBois said, “there's a dramatic difference” in the relationship between the government and faith-based groups since Hurricane Katrina.

“There were a lot of groups that felt like they weren't plugged in before,” he said.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “I have never made a distinction that the faith-based communities were something separate from the team.”

The Baptists are not the only church group with highly organized disaster relief teams. More than a dozen denominations, from the United Jewish Federation to the Islamic Circle of North America, jumped into relief operations here.

Each is known among government emergency crews for its own specialty. The Mennonites help to warehouse emergency supplies. The Presbyterians do counseling. Lutherans have a broad network of churches that can provide shelter, and specialize in long-term relief work.

All of them rely on donations and special fund-raising events. Some work directly with the Red Cross and state and federal emergency management agencies, which provide supplies and technical assistance.

The Southern Baptists cook the food that the Red Cross provides, and then Red Cross crews help deliver it. Since March 31, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross have worked together to deliver more than 638,000 meals and snacks to communities affected by this spring's rash of severe weather.

Churches can often get deeper into a community faster than secular rescue teams, said Juliet Choi, senior director of partner services for the American Red Cross . In the Deep South especially, volunteers from the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American Christian denomination in the country, are an essential link between victims and government disaster services.

“There's always a sense of comfort when you see someone who looks similar to you,” Ms. Choi said.

Religion and secular rescue efforts do not always mix easily. Jessica Powers, a Red Cross volunteer from New York who ran the feeding operation in conjunction with the Southern Baptist group here, said that on a disaster mission in Louisiana, a Baptist worker riding along with the Red Cross was proselytizing victims.

“I had to say to him that the Red Cross is a humanitarian organization, and one of our positions is neutrality,” she said.

For the Baptists, spreading the word about Jesus Christ is an essential reason they head into disaster zones over and over.

“You have an opportunity to tell people that the Lord loves you,” Mr. Blankenship said. “When you hand someone food when they're hungry, the door's open.”

Still, the couple is used to sometimes having to be subtle. In Sri Lanka, they were cautioned against wearing crosses or the yellow shirts that identify them as part of the Southern Baptist Convention crew. And they were told not to witness.

“It didn't stop me, though,” Mrs. Blankenship said. She passed the word on to her interpreters.

Sitting on their inflatable beds in a Sunday school classroom here on what was their 48th wedding anniversary, they agreed that their main goal was helping people. There is no better feeling, they said.

The Blankenships, who pay their own way to the disasters, got their start when they answered a spiritual calling to volunteer for intensive disaster training through their church. But they never figured it would become the defining aspect of their lives.

“You think, ‘I'll go every once in a while,' ” Mrs. Blankenship said, “but then it gets to you. It becomes part of your life. When something happens, you've just got to be there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/us/09baptist.html?ref=us

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Boarding? Denied. Lock and Loading? Sure.

Here is a chilling and potentially lethal fact of life: A person on the F.B.I.'s terrorist watch list is barred from boarding an airplane yet is quite free to buy high-power firearms and ammunition at any American gun shop.

This bizarre “terror gap” is starkly underlined by the latest federal data showing that 272 individuals on the terrorist watch list attempted to buy firearms last year, and all but 25 were cleared to make purchases. Those rejected had records for criminal felonies, spousal violence and other threats stipulated in federal gun controls that still don't use the terrorist watch list as a red-flag caution.

The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama wanted to rectify the situation, proposing that the attorney general be given authority to block gun sales to those on the list, after they were investigated and deemed suspicious under careful guidelines. But successive Congresses rejected reform bills — cowering as usual before the gun lobby, which deemed it an “arbitrary” interference with its never-to-be-trumped right to bear arms.

The watch list is ever a work in progress and innocent citizens have too often complained of being barred from flying. But this shortcoming has nothing to do with the dangerous loophole that Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, are again trying to close.

The last Congress, in its 11th-hour rush, showed no qualms about approving a ridiculous proposal requiring 9/11 responders and victims to be checked against the terrorist watch list before receiving federal health care benefits. If first-responder heroes must be put to the test, how can Congress continue to guarantee the gun rights of individuals already on the terrorist watch list?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/opinion/09mon3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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N.Y. lawmakers: Give victims bounty

by: Jennifer Epstein

May 9, 2011

Two New York congressmen want to see the federal government's reward money for Osama bin Laden's capture go to groups that support first responders, survivors and family members of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

At a press conference Sunday at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, Democratic Reps. Anthony Weiner and Jerry Nadler, whose district includes Ground Zero, introduced a bill that would direct up to $50 million intended to be a bounty for bin Laden to groups that have helped those affected move on with their lives.

Since bin Laden's capture appears to be the product of official intelligence efforts, reports have suggested that the reward may not be paid out.

“If the bounty isn't paid, Osama bin Laden's victims should get it,” Weiner said.

Instead, Weiner said, “families and groups who helped deal with survivors of 9/11” should “benefit.” Nadler added that the money “was allocated for 9/11 victims in effect, and this is simply, saying use it more effectively for the purpose that it was set up in the first place.”

The State Department offered up a $25 million bounty for bin Laden in 2001, and in 2004, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) led the effort to pass a bill that would give the secretary of state the discretion to raise that total to $50 million. Clinton, of course, is now secretary of state.

A State Department spokesman told CNN last week that “the department does not generally discuss nominations for awards,” and, “if it were paid, it could be less” than the maximum.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=36806DBE-7A1D-4482-82EB-0C51FF11CE31

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