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From Los Angeles Times

Pair accused of plotting Seattle attack

Two men, one from Los Angeles, are arrested. They are accused of planning an assault on a military recruiting center with grenades and machine guns.

by Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

June 24, 2011

Reporting from Seattle

A bankrupt janitor from Seattle who admired Osama bin Laden and a Los Angeles man who said he was going on jihad were accused of plotting to attack a military recruiting center as vengeance for violence committed against Afghan civilians, according to a federal complaint Thursday.

"Imagine how fearful America will be, and they'll know they can't push the Muslims around," Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, 33, told an FBI informant, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Abdul-Latif, of Tukwila, Wash., also goes by Joseph Anthony Davis. He is accused of plotting with Walli Mujahidh, 32, of Los Angeles, also known as Frederick Domingue Jr., to drive up to the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station in south Seattle in a truck with a battering ram "that looks like the Titanic," open fire with machine guns and grenades, and "take out anybody wearing green or a badge."

"This is what I'm gonna do: I'm gonna post guard. I'm gonna come in, pop-pop the security guard. Run into the cafeteria, lay everybody down in there. Pop-pop-pop-pop," Mujahidh purportedly said in a conversation monitored by the FBI.

But authorities said the plot was foiled late last month after the longtime acquaintance that Abdul-Latif had contacted to help him buy weapons went to the police, who turned over the case to the FBI. From then on, the planning was captured on video and audio tape, authorities said.

Abdul-Latif told the informant he had $800 to $1,200 and wanted three guns, including fully automatic machine guns, and 10 hand grenades, according to the complaint. The informant took the money and placed an order.

On Wednesday night, he took the men to a warehouse garage in Seattle, where federal agents had placed three Colt M16-A1 assault rifles that had been rendered inoperable, authorities said. There, they were taken into custody.

Both face federal charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction (in this case, a grenade) and unlawful possession of firearms. They appeared in court Thursday and were scheduled for bail hearings Wednesday.

Authorities have not identified any connection between known terrorist organizations and either man.

FBI officials said Mujahidh waived his rights and submitted to an interview, during which he allegedly confessed.

"Driven by a violent, extreme ideology, these two young Americans are charged with plotting to murder men and women who are enlisting in the armed forces to serve and protect our country," Todd M. Hinnen, acting assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said he had learned of the purported attack Wednesday. "Public safety depends on the police and community working together," he said. "That's what happened in this case."

According to the criminal complaint and an affidavit filed in court, the pair initially planned to hit Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an Army and Air Force base south of Tacoma, Wash. There, several soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team have been facing courts-martial on charges of deliberately staging killings of Afghan civilians and, in some cases, keeping fingers and a skull as souvenirs.

Abdul-Latif allegedly told the informant that he wanted to die as a martyr during the attack, which was in retaliation for those and other "crimes" committed by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. He said he was "not comfortable with letting the legal system deal with these matters," FBI Agent Albert Kelly III said in an affidavit attached to the complaint.

Later, Abdul-Latif said he had decided on the processing center instead.

On June 8, the complaint said, Abdul-Latif and the informant drove to the military processing center, which includes other federal government offices and a daycare center.

Abdul-Latif commented on the presence of a security guard and security cameras near the entrance, according to the complaint, but added that he was not "worried" about the guard, saying: "We'll just kill him right away.... We can kill him first."

Abdul-Latif has a record of convictions for assault and theft, records show.

He filed for bankruptcy about a month ago, stating that expenses for his janitorial service greatly exceeded his income, the Associated Press reported.

"He seemed like a guy just trying to make it, having a rough time because business wasn't going very well," his bankruptcy attorney, Steve Dashiak, told the Associated Press. "To say that I didn't see this coming would be an understatement."

Mujahidh had no felony convictions, the FBI said, but records reviewed by The Times show a string of misdemeanor charges, mainly in Riverside County, for such offenses as burglary, theft, child neglect and marijuana possession. Many were dismissed.

He also was accused of violating a restraining order in Seattle in 2007. In a petition for a protective order in that case, cited by the Seattle Times, his estranged wife claimed that Mujahidh, identified then as Domingue, had kicked in her door "and destroyed everything that was in the apartment."

Mujahidh arrived in Seattle by bus on June 21. Although Abdul-Latif had provided $800 to the informant to buy the guns, he had to scrounge together the money to help pay his co-conspirator's bus fare, according to the affidavit. The pass code Mujahidh was to use to pick up his ticket was "OBL," referring to Bin Laden, the FBI said.

According to the affidavit, Mujahidh said he had told a couple of "brothers" in Los Angeles that he was going to Seattle on a jihad.

"This is my way of getting rid of sins, man.... I got so many of 'em," Mujahidh is quoted as saying, indicating that he would rather die than be arrested.

"That's what it's going to come down to, because if they surround the building, the only way out is through them … and guns blazing, man, guns blazing," he said. "We're not walking out of there alive."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-seattle-terror-20110624,0,6203074,print.story

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After Whitey Bulger arrest, who's left on FBI's Ten Most Wanted List?

Several jokesters are wondering where in the world is Carmen San Diego, and suggesting that Bigfoot may be next. Others are giving kudos to the FBI, which might want to consider an update to its Ten Most Wanted List.

According to the FBI's website, among the remaining eight most wanted fugitives are:

• Semion Mogilevich, a Ukraine-born businessman known as the "Billion Dollar Don," accused of participating in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud thousands of investors.
  
  
• Robert William Fisher, 50, who is accused of killing his wife and two young children then blowing up their Scottsdale, Ariz., home in 2001.
  
  
• Glen Stewart Godwin, a convicted murderer who escaped from Folsom Prison, was captured in Mexico, then escaped again from a prison in Puente Grande, Mexico.

Check out the full FBI list.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/whitey-bulger-fbi-ten-most-wanted-list.html

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Protecting undocumented workers

Legislation would expand the protection of 'U visas' to those who come forward to report workplace violations.

by Harold Meyerson

June 24, 2011

Nearly every day for three years, Josue Melquisedec Diaz reported to work by going to a New Orleans street corner where contractors, subcontractors and people fixing up their places went to hire day laborers. It was there, one day in 2008, that a contractor picked him up and took him to Beaumont, Texas, just across the Louisiana line, to work on the cleanup, demolition and reconstruction projects that Beaumont was undertaking in the wake of Hurricane Gustav.

Diaz was put to work in a residential neighborhood that had been flooded. The American workers who were involved in the cleanup, he noted, had been given masks, gloves, boots and sometimes special suits to avoid infection. No such precautions were afforded Diaz and his crew of undocumented immigrant workers. "We were made to work with bare hands, picking up dead animals," he says. "We were working in contaminated water," tearing down and repairing washed-out homes.

Diaz told his story last week to a gathering of legislators and others in a meeting room at the U.S. Capitol, just a few doors down from the Senate chamber. He said that he and his crew asked their boss for the same safety equipment given their American counterparts. Instead, Diaz said, the boss responded by cutting the undocumented workers' pay in half — at which point, Diaz and 11 others went on strike. Soon after, both the local police and immigration officers showed up to haul off the workers. The strikers were first taken to a local jail, then transferred to a federal immigration jail.

Fortunately, Diaz was a member of the New Orleans Congress of Day Laborers, which managed to get him and his co-workers released after four months behind bars. Since then, three of the 12 workers have been deported, one has died, and Diaz faces a deportation hearing scheduled for July 20. At least until then, he is trying to publicize the cause of workers who labor in dangerous conditions, who are compelled to work long hours for no extra pay, who get cheated altogether out of their paychecks and who have, in this nation of laws, no legal recourse.

Undocumented immigrants are just one among many groups of workers who effectively lack the on-the-job protections that most Americans take for granted. When the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a national minimum wage and overtime pay, was enacted in 1938, it excluded restaurant employees and retail, domestic and farm workers. (Winning the votes of Southern senators required President Franklin D. Roosevelt to effectively exclude all occupations then largely filled by African Americans.)

In time, the act was expanded to cover some of those workers, but agricultural laborers still have no federal legal right to collect overtime, home healthcare workers have no right to the minimum wage and "tipped" workers such as waiters are entitled to a minimum of just $2.13 an hour. Nor are agricultural and domestic workers accorded the right to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act (though farm workers have won this right on the state level in California), and such low-paid independent contractors as port truckers and taxi drivers are similarly excluded.

As construction workers, the Diaz 12 actually came under the protections of wage, hour and unionization laws. But employers know they can violate these laws with impunity when their workers have no union contract and are undocumented. The odds are overwhelming that the outcome of such conflicts is worker deportation, not management fines. This de facto exemption of undocumented immigrants from the protection of workplace laws actually encourages employers to hire more undocumented workers. It is easy for management to ignore labor laws when employees can't complain.

Last week, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez and California Reps. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) and George Miller (D-Martinez) introduced legislation (the POWER Act) that would give workers like Diaz provisional "U visas." The visas were designed to provide temporary legal status to immigrant victims who come forward to report violent crimes, and the proposed legislation would expand the protection to those who come forward to report workplace violations. Such legislation, Menendez pointed out, would not only protect immigrants but keep unscrupulous employers from lowering labor standards generally. "When some workers are easy to exploit," Menendez said, "conditions for all workers suffer."

That's also the message that Diaz brought to the Capitol last week. "When I was in jail, I met many workers with stories like mine, but whose voices are never heard," he said. "I made a promise to them that I would bring their stories out with me."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-undocumented-abuses-20110624,0,152757,print.story

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From Google News

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US says man targeted military sites

LEESBURG, Va. — A Marine Corps reservist arrested in a security scare near the Pentagon last week was charged yesterday in a series of predawn shootings at the Pentagon and other military buildings in the Washington area last year.

Yonathan Melaku, 22, of Alexandria, has been in custody since early last Friday, when he was caught after fleeing from police while trespassing inside Arlington National Cemetery. His behavior and possessions prompted suspicion from authorities, who closed the highways leading to the Pentagon during the Friday rush hour and launched an intensive investigation.

Federal prosecutors said in court documents yesterday that they found bomb-making materials in Melaku's backpack and later, inside his home, found a typewritten list of potential bomb components. Investigators also found a video he took of himself firing shots outside the National Museum of the Marine Corps last fall and repeatedly saying the Arabic words “Allahu Akbar,'' which means “God is Great.''

“That's what they get. That's my target. That's the military building. It's going to be attacked,'' he said in the video, which shows him firing shots out the passenger side window at the museum, according to court papers.

Melaku lists his religion as Muslim in military papers, according to a Marine Corps spokesman. He has been a Marine reservist since September 2007 but has never been deployed overseas.

Investigators said Melaku was carrying a backpack last Friday with a quantity of ammonium nitrate, widely used in explosives; a spiral notebook containing references to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden; spent 9mm shell casings; and cans of spray paint.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/06/24/virginia__man_charged_in_2010_dc_area_military_shootings/

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