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From the Los Angeles Times

State Senate OKs part of California Dream Act

The measure would allow college students who are illegal immigrants to receive public financial aid.

by Teresa Watanabe and Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times

September 1, 2011

The college dreams of thousands of students who are illegal immigrants moved closer to fulfillment Wednesday after the state Senate approved a bill that for the first time would give them access to public financial aid.

Part of a two-bill package known as the California Dream Act, the measure would allow undocumented students who qualify for reduced in-state tuition to apply for Cal Grants, community college waivers and other public aid programs. To be eligible, they must be California high school graduates who attended schools in the state at least three years, and demonstrate financial need and academic merit.

The Senate vote brought relief to Brian Lee, a UCLA undergraduate who was brought to the U.S. at age 4 from South Korea and fell out of legal status when his mother did not renew their visas. Lee, a biology major who hopes to become a dentist, said the chance to apply for financial aid would help him finish school more quickly and alleviate the stress of working multiple under-the-table jobs. As it is, he has worked for two academic quarters to pay for each term he attends.

"I feel there is light at the end of the tunnel, finally," said Lee, 24, who has completed just two quarters in more than two years.

Carlos Perea, a 19-year-old undocumented student from Mexico who attends Santa Ana Community College, said the bill's passage would help him achieve his goal of transferring to a four-year university. He wants to major in political science and work for a nonprofit organization when he graduates.

But opponents decried the bill, AB 131, saying the state could not afford new spending, particularly on illegal immigrants.

"It's against the rule of law for benefits to be given out to people here without legal status," Sen. Doug La Malfa (R-Richvale) said in an interview. "People are just insulted. The state is out of money and we are opening a new door here for more funds to be expended."

The measure passed 22-11 on a party-line vote, with Democratic support and Republican opposition. It is expected to return this week to the Assembly, which previously approved it, for concurrence on Senate amendments. If approved, it will be sent to Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature.

During the floor debate, La Malfa read a letter from a Chico-area resident who complained that his daughter, a U.S citizen, recently had her state financial aid cut and now must consider getting a job or postponing college.

The constituent said the bill has "shattered dreams" for college students who are legal California residents and shows that lawmakers are out of touch.

But Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Montebello) told his colleagues the measure is about rewarding young people who work hard and are good students.

"This is about promoting success," he said. "Those who work hard, become good students, should not be punished for decisions made by their parents."

It is not known how many undocumented students would be eligible for the aid. A Senate committee analysis estimated the bill's cost at about $40 million. That includes $13 million for Cal Grants, which average about $4,500; up to $15 million in community college waivers; and $12 million in institutional aid from the University of California and California State University systems.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dream-20110901,0,5022114,print.story

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Editorial: Pricey homeland security

Protecting the nation at any cost has resulted in unnecessary and eccentric responses. More wisdom must be employed.

September 1, 2011

It was a natural reaction after 9/11: Protect the nation at any cost. But a survey of homeland security projects by Times staff writer Kim Murphy reveals that the "any cost" rationale has resulted in unnecessary and eccentric responses to the possibility of a terrorist act. Congress should block such projects in the future.

For example, Murphy told of a grant for anti-terrorism equipment to a county in Nebraska, which received thousands of dollars for cattle nose leads, halters and electric prods — in case terrorists waged biological warfare against cows. Closer to home, Glendale got a $205,000 grant, which it used to purchase a 9-ton BearCat armored vehicle, one of more than 300 deployed across the country. (Officials feared that terrorists might target DreamWorks Animation or the Disney creative campus.) In one case in New York, the connection of a $3-million grant to counter-terrorism was a mystery even to the beneficiaries.

It is hard to evaluate the efficacy of security arrangements — think of the elaborate airport screening by the Transportation Security Administration — because no terrorist act has occurred. Supporters also can always argue that the absence of incidents proves that the system works. (We're skeptical, though, about the deterrent value of cattle prods.) But the deterrent argument is more plausible in some places than in others. That's why planners should concentrate on the "where" of security precautions rather than the "what."

The truth is that not all potential terrorist targets are equal. It's prudent to have elaborate preparations for New York, Washington and even Los Angeles (although a BearCat might not have much utility in a terrorist attack). But grants for homeland security projects in smaller cities or rural or suburban areas seem more like pork than precaution. And it's no excuse for those communities to say that the BearCats and other high-end equipment can be used for routine police functions. If Congress wants to fund local law enforcement, it knows how to do so. But it shouldn't characterize such largesse as a response to 9/11.

With the anniversary of those attacks approaching, homeland security is the ultimate sacred cow, which explains why the federal and state governments are spending $75 billion a year on security. But Murphy's article makes a persuasive case that many of the grants to localities are unnecessary or poorly conceived. Congress and the Department of Homeland Security need to review current grant procedures and target federal funds where they are most needed.

A single terrorist incident can be devastating to large numbers of people, as 9/11 demonstrated. That doesn't mean the nation needs to be blanketed with state-of-the art equipment, some of it only tangentially related to terrorism. In homeland security, as in other areas, choices must be made.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-911pork-20110901,0,5213090,print.story

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From Google News

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9/11 artifacts from FBI terror trials to go public

U.S. Counterterror Chief: Al Qaeda Now on the Ropes

September 1, 2011

Associated Press

On a steady slide. On the ropes. Taking shots to the body and head.

That's how White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan described Al Qaeda on Wednesday as he offered the first on-record confirmation that Al Qaeda's latest second-in-command was killed last week in Pakistan -- roughly four months after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden there.

In an Associated Press interview, Brennan said the death of Atiyah Abd al-Rahman in Pakistan's tribal areas last week was a "huge blow" to the group, damaging the network and keeping Al Qaeda's leadership too busy trying to hide to plot new attacks. Al-Rahman reportedly was hit by a CIA drone strike.

The former CIA officer described that as proof that the White House has found the right formula to fight Al Qaeda, by pairing U.S. intelligence and counterterrorist forces with host nations from Pakistan to Iraq to Yemen, fighting beside them or sometimes through them. The goal is to keep Al Qaeda off balance, unable to replace the seasoned terrorists the U.S. campaign is taking out.

"If they're worrying about their security ... they're going to have less time to plot and plan," Brennan said of the militants. "They're going to be constantly looking over their shoulder or up in the air or wherever, and it really has disrupted their operational cadence and ability to carry out attacks."

He pointed to the killing of al-Rahman as an example of how U.S. pressure is degrading the network.

"There's no longer a management grooming program there. They don't stay in place long enough," Brennan said.

Al-Rahman had barely assumed a leadership position since bin Laden's death pushed his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, into the top spot. Brennan described al-Rahman as a "workaholic" and an "operational mastermind" who kept Al Qaeda's nodes from Yemen to Europe connected.

"Taking him out of commission is huge," Brennan said. "There's not another bin Laden out there. I don't know if there's another Atiyah Abd al-Rahman out there."

Brennan said the key to keeping another al-Rahman from rising is to keep constant pressure on all locations where Al Qaeda operates, working through host countries to target operatives who "are flowing sometimes back and forth" among Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and other parts of Africa.

Brennan brushed off some of the major crises in those relationships of late, from Pakistan's strident objections to drone strikes as a continued affront to its sovereignty in the wake of the bin Laden raid, to the revolts across the Mideast that swept from power U.S. counterterror allies in places like Egypt.

He said the relationship with Pakistan is improving.

And he described the Arab revolts as a "speed bump" that only temporarily disrupted cooperation. He said U.S. contacts in Egypt have been able to recover quickly following longtime leader Hosni Mubarak's ouster earlier this year. The counterterrorism relationship with Tunisia, where the so-called Arab Spring movement began, also remains strong, he said.

Brennan said the uprising in Yemen, however, had kept Yemeni forces engaged in a fight for political survival, and had slowed down the fight against arguably the most dangerous bin Laden affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP, as the affiliate is known, has worked with the rebel tribes to grab large swaths of territory in the south.

The unrest has forced the U.S. to draw down the hundred-plus military and intelligence personnel it had working with Yemeni counterterrorism forces. Those Yemeni forces, led by ailing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's sons, have been reluctant to leave the capital unguarded, even when a brigade of conventional Yemeni troops became trapped by Al Qaeda in the Abyan region.

U.S. forces had to air-drop food and water to the embattled unit, which was threatening to surrender. Brennan said the U.S. has since persuaded the Yemenis to send enough forces their way to free them, and he has urged the country's vice president to send more troops into the fight.

"This political tumult is ... leading them to be focused on their positioning for internal political purposes as opposed to doing all they can against AQAP," he said.

Saleh is still recovering in Saudi Arabia, with some 70 percent of his body burned and a lung pierced from an assassination attempt in June, as he was praying in his palace compound.

While Brennan says Saudi Arabia would allow Saleh to return from his temporary medical exile, he repeated the White House's earlier calls for Saleh to stay away and let new elections take place.

"I've told him that I do not believe it's in his interests, Yemen's interests or our interests ... to go back to Yemen," Brennan said.

He called Yemen a "tinderbox" that could erupt into a civil war that Al Qaeda would take advantage of.

Policing in the Post-9/11 Era

In America's largest Arab community, police are pioneering a new way to fight terrorism by strengthening neighborhood ties

by Jonathan Walters

August 31, 2011

Just minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Ron Haddad's phone rang. It was his boss, Detroit Police Chief Charles E. Wilson, who was in the Pentagon when the plane hit. “He called me right away,” says Haddad, who at the time was a precinct commander. “He said, ‘What do you think we should do?'”

Haddad and Wilson were hardly alone. In cities across the country, the question on every law enforcement professional's mind at that moment was a very local one: “What do we do now?”

Their worlds had turned sideways. Rumors and uncertainty about possible follow-up attacks were sweeping the nation. A backlash against American Arabs was brewing. Little solid information about the attack was available. Yet police departments found themselves catapulted into a new role: front-line defenders in the fight against domestic terrorist attacks, a job that had long been considered the purview of the federal government.

The first concern in every major city across the country was assessing what other targets terrorists might hit. Police departments scrambled to develop lists of vulnerable, high-value targets and ways to protect them. In Detroit, that included such assets as the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel, a massive water plant, an oil refinery, a chemical factory and multiple sports arenas. At the same time, Haddad says his department was also dealing with a backlash against Arab-American-owned businesses, which were under sporadic attack. So his department was desperately trying to maintain community calm.

Those two tasks frame how policing in the U.S. has evolved since 9/11. There's been a push to improve local police departments' capacity to gather and analyze intelligence on targets and threats. In addition, there's a new focus on how departments interact with their own citizens, who many in law enforcement now view as critical partners in preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Most fundamentally, 9/11 forever changed the mission of police departments in the nation's larger metropolitan areas. With the exception of a handful of police professionals in cities like New York, Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, “Nobody in American policing was focused on international terrorism prior to 9/11,” says William J. Bratton, who headed up the New York City and Los Angeles police departments, and is currently co-chair of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Homeland Security Advisory Council.

In the aftermath of 9/11, two challenges became blatantly obvious. First, the emerging terrorism threat was going to require more local police involvement. Second, there was an increasing number of homegrown terrorists. “You had several pressures occurring that have brought the local police more into the area of terrorism,” Bratton says. “It was now not only ‘homeland security.' It was increasingly ‘hometown security.'”

Terrorism itself is a complicated topic if only because what constitutes “terrorism” isn't clear. Were the shootings at Columbine High School a terrorist act? Was the attempted murder of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- and the collateral homicides -- a terrorist act?

It's an important question to ask because it underlies how police approach -- and the public views -- atrocious attacks. In some cases, actual or planned violence is part of an organized effort to take down the U.S. government and its economy. That was certainly the case with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. citizen who planned a coordinated attack on the New York City subway system with the help of al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan. In other cases, attacks are aimed at specific government and corporate policies, which is what motivates violent actions by some animal rights and environmental activists. In both of these cases, the organizations and individuals are committing acts of terrorism. But in numerous other attacks, the violence being contemplated or executed may not have any grounding in politics or policy -- or even in reality. It may be straightforward criminality or actions stemming from severe mental illness.

That is the core of a dilemma faced by police departments today: They must determine how to defend against organized terrorism as well as the seemingly random acts of either criminal, crazy or just wildly disgruntled individuals. In the wake of 9/11, the focus of police departments swung sharply toward defending against organized terrorism. Metropolitan police departments started improving partnerships with federal agencies and gathering huge volumes of information based on the assumption that given the right raw data and their ability to analyze it well, law enforcement could head off organized terrorist attacks.

The most obvious manifestation of that approach -- one that was fueled by billions in federal dollars -- was the creation of “fusion centers.” Nationally 72 fusion centers have been outfitted and staffed to promote the collection and sharing of intelligence among and between local, state and federal agencies. Fusion centers epitomize an approach to terrorism prevention that puts a premium on sucking in and sifting through massive amounts of information from all levels of law enforcement and other sources, formal and informal, as a way to stay ahead of terrorists.

Recent arrests of two suspected terrorists in the Seattle metro region are credited in part to Seattle's fusion center, after a tip was passed along from a man the two had approached about buying guns and grenades. “That information came to the attention of a detective assigned to the fusion center by the Seattle Police Department,” said Seattle police Lt. Ron Leavell in a local news report.

But fusion centers have their limitations. New York City is widely recognized as having the most sophisticated fusion center in the country. Yet when Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistan-born immigrant, parked an SUV filled with explosives in the heart of Times Square, it wasn't information drawn from a fusion center that thwarted the attack. It was the combination of the pyrotechnical incompetence of the would-be terrorist and a couple of alert street vendors that brought the vehicle to the attention of police. The whole incident came way too close to being a horrific example of the first maxim of anti-terrorism work as articulated by international terrorism expert Peter Beering: “We have to get it right every time; terrorists only have to get it right once.”

That tenet is what makes Ron Haddad interesting. The former Detroit precinct commander became the police chief of Dearborn, Mich., in 2008, where he has since gained a national reputation as an advocate for and an effective practitioner of a very different approach to terrorism prevention. It relies less on gathering tons of intelligence and more on partnering with citizens and the community as the first line of defense in both homeland and hometown security.

In that regard, Haddad, who like Bratton is also a member of the DHS's Homeland Security Advisory Council, has a particularly vexing task: winning the trust of the city's Arabic and Muslim minorities. Dearborn, with 98,000 residents, is home to the largest per capita population of Arab and Muslim Americans of any city in the United States. Around 30 percent of its population speaks Arabic languages. Given that profile, Dearborn is potentially both an incubator and a target of homegrown and foreign-sponsored terrorism.

The police response has been to pull people of different religions and ethnicities into a citywide network of aware and active citizens -- that effort is especially noteworthy when it comes to involvement with citizens of Arabic descent.

“The Arab and Muslim community finds this continuing need to assert that they're Americans and that they're not part of the enemy,” Haddad says. “We try to defuse that by telling them, ‘You don't have to explain that; we're all on even ground.'”

Yet reassurances of an even ground are hardly sufficient in winning the trust of the city's Arabic and Muslim minorities -- a trust that is essential to their joining the fight against terrorism. What Dearborn police officials have learned is to adjust policies, value new and perhaps unorthodox partnerships, and respond to street-level warning signs. An important element of this effort is to signal to those in the Arabic and Muslim communities that the police aren't some occupying force ready to pounce, but that they are there to protect and serve.

This is a tricky proposition, because it means convincing a population that could easily and quickly become isolated, defensive and suspicious (and in some places, this is exactly what has happened) that they're an integral part of the bigger community. To do this, Dearborn has, among other things, softened its policing approach when it comes to dealing with budding criminals and terrorists. For example, in one of the city's Yemini neighborhoods, there was a group of kids who had been identified as “ripe for the picking,” as Haddad puts it. They were skipping school and associating with “wannabe gangbangers” from Detroit.

People in the neighborhood wanted the police to do something, Haddad says, but they didn't “want us to give these kids a criminal record.” So the department's approach has been to work with schools and other agencies to get the youngsters back in school and back on track. But for that to work in the first place, Haddad says, “the community has to have a sense of trust that they can come to the police or their local government.”

Another way that the city of Dearborn has helped connect key interests in support of homeland and hometown security is through its Building Respect in Diverse Groups to Enhance Ethnic Sensitivity (BRIDGES) program. BRIDGES includes members of the Arab-American community, and also federal, state and local government officials.

It began right after 9/11 with the convening of Arab-American advocacy groups, the FBI, the state police, the Dearborn police and other community members. The idea, says Dearborn Mayor John B. O'Reilly, is that “everyone could come to the table to try and work through how we could all support the same goals.”

According to O'Reilly, BRIDGES has been an effective mechanism for building widespread trust between and among the Arab-American community, other community members and government officials. “It's allowed us to have a dialogue about our shared interests versus everyone holding their cards against their chests and saying, ‘Well, let me see what you got.'”

A big part of winning the trust of the Arab and Muslim population has also meant trying to get federal agencies like the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to back off and smarten up. The threat of deportation is a huge issue in any immigrant community, so if going to the police means arriving on USCIS's radar, that's a potential deal breaker when it comes to reporting suspicious activity to city officials. Dearborn officials have reassured residents that a call to the police doesn't instantly mean a background check.

Another huge problem in the greater Detroit metro region was the way that Arab and Muslim Americans were being treated when they crossed the U.S. and Canadian border. Dearborn sits near the busiest northern border crossing, and when U.S. customs officers “hold a Muslim woman in custody along with her kids for six or seven hours because they come up with a match for her name on a watch list, that's a problem,” O'Reilly says. But since the city held meetings with high-level customs officials from Washington, D.C., the border-crossing problem has eased.

Aside from the city officials involved in the program, other Dearborn leaders see the overall approach as positive. When the national media focused on Dearborn in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to see what kind of Arab-American backlash there might be, “They didn't find the story they thought they were going to find,” says Fran Helner, pastoral associate at the Sacred Heart Parish and spokeswoman for the Dearborn Area Ministerial Association, which promotes religious tolerance. “There is a strong feeling among our whole community that we need to be open and accepting of each other.”

Statistics appear to bear out Dearborn's approach. More than 80 percent of foiled terrorist plots across the country were discovered via initial clues provided from law enforcement or the general public, according to a recent Institute for Homeland Security Solutions study of terrorist attacks against the U.S. from 1999 to 2009.

Dearborn has experienced it first-hand. A plot to set off something like a car bomb in front of the nation's largest mosque, the Mosque of America, was foiled thanks to a local restaurant owner taking seriously comments he overheard at his bar. A likely plot to gun down Wayne State University Medical School staff was foiled by a group of Arab-American kids who saw suspicious activity at a local park and reported it. “Those kids had no hesitation calling 911,” says O'Reilly, “because it's not like the police are the enemy.”

Increasingly, it appears that other major metropolitan police departments are coming around to the Dearborn approach to homeland security. “We realized we had a lot of gaps from the prevention point of view,” says Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of counterterrorism efforts for the city. “We have to leverage community support. We can't do this without them.”

Indeed, in July 2010, DHS officials launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” public awareness campaign. It aims to rally citizens as first-line defenders against terrorism. In fact, Haddad was part of the Homeland Security Advisory Council subcommittee that helped develop the campaign. “Secretary [Janet] Napolitano gave us a clear mandate,” he says. “She believes counterterrorism could best be fortified and expanded from the basic community policing level -- from the grass roots.”

William Bratton calls that “force multiplication.” If 40,000 feds keeping an eye out for terrorism is a good thing, then 800,000 state and local law enforcement officials is even better. Best of all is enlisting the help of 300 million-plus U.S. residents. For Haddad, the 98,000 citizens of Dearborn are his force multiplication. “If somebody's going to find out something that's going on,” he says, “it's going to be somebody local, and that's what we've zeroed in on.”

Kiosks and digital displays assist in community-oriented police efforts

According to the Tulare (Calif.) Advance-Register, Tulare police recently accepted a $37,667 grant to buy three computer-aided dispatch monitors and a computerized kiosk to be displayed at the department's lobby.

The Tulare police chief said funds from the grant received must be spent on equipment, technologies and projects that promote community-policing programs.

The dispatch monitors will show supervisors data from police calls as they go into the system, allowing resources to be better coordinated to reported incidents.

The computerized kiosk will display and stream crime trends and statistical data to include contact and resource information, and will also interface with the department's under-construction website, which will provide information and schedule of events furthering the department's community-oriented policing efforts.

For more information about public-sector kiosk deployments, visit our Government research center

http://www.digitalsignagetoday.com/article/183930/Kiosks-and-digital-displays-assist-in-community-oriented-police-efforts

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