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From the Los Angeles Times

A 'specific, credible' terror threat aimed at 9/11 memorials

The suspicion stems in part from intelligence gathering during the raid that led to the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The terrorist organization has shown an interest in important dates and anniversaries as symbol-rich times to stage an offensive.

"In this instance, it's accurate that there is specific, credible but unconfirmed threat information," Matt Chandler, press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

PHOTOS: The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks

ABC News was reporting Thursday that U.S. authorities are looking for at least three people who entered the country in August by air with the intent to launch a vehicle-borne attack, possibly in New York or Washington, D.C. ABC News said that one of those people may be a U.S. citizen.

Authorities are said to be considering raising the national threat level. ABC News also reported that, according to sources, President Obama had been briefed on the threat and then updated throughout the day.

Here's the rest of the statement from the Department of Homeland Security:

As we always do before important dates like the anniversary of 9/11, we will undoubtedly get more reporting in the coming days. Sometimes this reporting is credible and warrants intense focus, other times it lacks credibility and is highly unlikely to be reflective of real plots underway. Regardless, we take all threat reporting seriously, and we have taken, and will continue to take all steps necessary to mitigate any threats that arise. We continue to ask the American people to remain vigilant as we head into the weekend.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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Fast and Furious guns tied to second violent crime

by Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

September 8, 2011

In the second violent crime in this country connected with the ATF's failed Fast and Furious program, two Arizona undercover police officers were allegedly assaulted last year when they attempted to stop two men in a stolen vehicle with two of the program's weapons in a confrontation south of Phoenix.

The officers, members of an elite Arizona Department of Public Safety law enforcement unit, said the driver rammed their cars and threatened them with the firearms, and then fled into the Arizona desert. The driver was caught and arrested, and two firearms –- a Beretta pistol and AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle -- were found in the stolen Ford truck, the police said.

The suspect, Angel Hernandez-Diaz, 48, believed to be a Mexican national, was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, driving the stolen vehicle and illegal possession of the weapons. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to stand trial in Pinal County, Ariz., next month.

Also arrested in the incident was the passenger, Rosario Zavala, 30, of Mexico, who was charged with possession of narcotics and the stolen vehicle.

The encounter came five months after the Fast and Furious program began, in which ATF agents allowed the illegal purchase of weapons to try to track the firearms to Mexican drug cartels. And it occurred nine months before the fatal slaying in December of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, killed in a separate assault in which two Fast and Furious firearms were discovered at the scene south of Tucson.

Sources said this is the first case so far of Fast and Furious weapons found at the scene of another violent crime other than Terry's. Officials at ATF headquarters and the Justice Department are sifting through records to see whether there are more. About 2,000 weapons were allowed to be illegally purchased in the Phoenix area, and the vast majority were lost track of by ATF agents.

“There is bound to be a lot of them,” said one source close to case.

The new incident outside Phoenix, in the suburb of Maricopa, is the crime that the Justice Department alluded to last week in a report to congressional investigators reviewing Fast and Furious. They did not, however, provide any details. The Justice Department originally told Congress there were 11 sites in the U.S. with Fast and Furious guns, but last week revised the number to two identified so far.

Information about the crime surfaced Thursday after officials at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives at Washington headquarters contacted Arizona law enforcement officials, and they agreed to discuss it.

The weapons found in the vehicle were the 9-millimeter Beretta, hidden under the front console, and the AK-47 in the back seat. Authorities in Arizona said they were told both weapons were illegally purchased under the Fast and Furious program that began in November 2009. Also in the truck were four boxes of ammunition for the AK-47, a box of 23 9-mm bullets for the Beretta, and four cases of Bud Light beer.

According to police reports, indictments and Officer Carrick Cook, the truck was stopped on the night of March 4, 2010, when the undercover unit realized the vehicle was stolen. Rather than exit, the driver revved the car and repeatedly rammed the two unmarked police vehicles.

Inside the truck, the driver removed the Beretta from his waistband, flashed it at the officers, and then bolted from the truck. He then turned in a crouched position as though he was pointing another weapon. At that point, Officer Mike Ruiz fired several times because “he felt his life was in danger and that of the other officer.”

Ruiz missed, and Hernandez-Diaz surrendered.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-atf-gun-20110908,0,7402255,print.story

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Growing up without a father after 9/11

Tiffany Ramsaroop has spent the last decade growing from a third-grader to a college freshman. Yet at every milestone there has been a hole where her dad should have been.

by Geraldine Baum and Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times

September 9, 2011

Reporting from New York

Every morning, Tiffany Ramsaroop wakes up to a picture of her dad. It's tacked in the middle of a bulletin board in her lavender bedroom.

Vishnoo Ramsaroop died 10 years ago in the south tower of the World Trade Center. He was a maintenance worker who supported a wife and three girls on $43,000 a year.

Tiffany, his oldest, was 8 when it happened. It was two years before she stopped believing he got hit in the head by debris and would stroll through the door having recovered from amnesia. Two more passed before she really cried.

Tiffany has walked the terrible line of people in grief, trying to move forward without forgetting. At 15, she flew to his native Trinidad and let his accent wash over her. His starched work shirt with his name ironed on the back of the collar hangs in her closet between the dresses and blouses. She put it on once, but doesn't want to talk about that.

When she turned 18 this summer, her first act as an adult was to have her father's name tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. "Vishnoo" takes up almost the entire space, in elaborate script, black as night.

The nation is preparing to commemorate the attacks Sunday. Tiffany won't be in Lower Manhattan that morning. The reminder is just too much.

America spent the last decade fighting two wars and thinking up ways to keep itself safe. Tiffany spent those years growing from a third-grader in a starched green plaid uniform to a college freshman impatient for new experiences. Yet at every milestone, at every family event, and in some part of almost every day since Sept. 11, 2001, there was a hole where her dad should have been.

That Tuesday, 3,052 children lost a parent in the terrorist attacks. The average age was 9. They came from wealth and from poverty and from countries around the world. This is one child's story.

This week Tiffany is attending her first classes at Queensborough Community College, not far from where she grew up. She is finding her way, asserting new independence. Her mother wanted to drive her the first day; she wanted to go it alone by bus.

Yet still she is bound to her family. It was Tiffany who accompanied her sister to freshman orientation at high school this week and who was at her bedside as she recovered from surgery last month. It was Tiffany who offered part of her earnings this summer to help her mother with bills.

Some day she would like to become a family therapist to make sure others have "the big conversations we didn't have about stuff."

The 10 years getting to this point have been filled with spaces and voids. During her high school graduation in June, she could almost see her father there.

"Ugggghhh…. At every single event I went to I wished my dad was there, holding up the camcorder, waving as soon as I saw him," she says, rubbing her freshly tattooed wrist. "It really sucks when you go to high school graduation and you see your best friend running toward her father."

Tiffany lives in a two-family house on a tight lot in a part of Queens called Jackson Heights, about two miles from LaGuardia Airport. The postage-stamp-sized front yard is overgrown with vegetables. When her father tended it, she remembers it being full of flowers.

These days the house is full of females — Tiffany lives there with her sisters, Ashley, 15, and Kimberly, 10, and Sita, their mother. Sita, 51, has two daughters from a previous relationship and two granddaughters, ages 4 and 3, who are almost always there scampering across the couches and into Tiffany's lap.

Ten pairs of worn fluffy slippers dot the stairs leading to a basement warren of bedrooms where the girls sleep. Tiffany's double bed fills practically all the space in her room. A narrow bureau is crowded with polish and makeup as well as a photograph of Tiffany wearing a strapless white satin dress and lighting a cake with 16 candles.

This is the same house Vishnoo, 45, left that morning, when the family piled into the minivan to drop him at the subway and then Tiffany and Ashley at PS 148. It should have been an exciting day in Miss Syed's class; about all Tiffany remembers is that her uniform was new. Then everyone else's parents came early to pick them up; her mother waited until school let out.

"I went to the car and my mom was crying and I said, 'What's wrong?' And she said, 'I'll show you when I get home.' I sat down on the couch and my mom put the TV on.... I didn't know what to say. All I could say was, 'Is Dad OK?'"

Tiffany remembers her father's job as a "gardener" who planted hibiscus and greenery around the trade center's vast plazas. It was the first work he got after he came to America and he did it for 17 years. When Tiffany didn't have school he took her to work with him. Even intact the towers were tall and scary; Tiffany stayed away from the windows. So when it was explained to her where he was that day she could clearly picture it.

Tiffany's father happened to be on the 35th floor in the south tower when the north tower was hit. He went up to the 56th floor for a better view. The last time anyone saw him he was waiting by an elevator bank to get down.

Then he was gone. No confirmation other than his absence. No remains. At first, believing might have been the hardest part for Tiffany. Hadn't her dad surprised his girls by taking them to the movies just the week before to see "Rat Race" and then let them sneak into "Rush Hour 2"? "Two movies in one day," they rejoiced to their mother that night.

He was always full of wonderful surprises. What about the time he packed a lunch and their bathing suits and plucked a sleeping Tiffany and her sister out of bed? They woke up in the parking lot of Six Flags in New Jersey. This had to be another one of his little pranks, like the way he threatened to eat up baby Kimberly, so sweet he called her "Candy." "No! You can't eat her!" the girls would squeal.

Day after day , while their mother searched hospitals, Tiffany sat on the front steps with Ashley, two little girls with pink Power Rangers, waiting for Dad to come home.

The first anniversary rolled around and Tiffany went happily along with her cousins to the ceremony at ground zero. She was 9, what else was she going to do? It was windy, and everybody said the dust of the deceased was swirling around. She didn't really connect.

"You know when you're a little kid, you don't have as much emotions? I felt like when I was younger I trapped my feelings in too much," Tiffany says.

Sita said it took two years before she could convince her daughters that their father wasn't coming home. Sometimes she wonders whether cancer or a car accident might have been easier for her girls to comprehend. "The way he go, it's like the earth opened and just take him away from them."

That's how it is for a lot of Sept. 11 children, nothing to take through the rituals of grief. Mental health experts call this "ambiguous loss."

The family buried an empty box at a cemetery off Queens Boulevard. Sita doesn't like to go; it holds no meaning. Now that she can drive, Tiffany takes her sisters on Valentine's Day and on her father's birthday and invites close friends to visit with her.

Moving on is complicated for children whose grief stems from an event so public; every anniversary, magazine covers and television specials can pull them backward.

"There are going to be more than 40 shows on TV about 9/11 just for this anniversary, so you can't avoid it," said Fran Furman, director of counseling at Tuesday's Children, a support group that has worked with nearly 6,000 members of Sept. 11 families. "Every time they show pictures of the towers exploding, our children and families look at that and say, 'My loved one is in that building.'"

Around age 12, on the cusp of adolescence, the dam broke for Tiffany. Vishnoo's only brother visited from Canada, and when he came through the door, she saw the spitting image of her father. That was the moment she realized he was never coming home. She cried and cried.

"It hurt me really badly," she says, sitting on a back porch cluttered with plants and furniture.

Time is supposed to heal, but it seemed only to fill Tiffany with questions: Who would walk her down the aisle? Who would fix her car when it broke down? Already, the family had stopped eating dinner together; without Dad to call them all to the table, they just took a plate of their mother's delicious rice and beans or macaroni pie and wandered to separate quarters.

Somebody had to try to fill his shoes. Tiffany appointed herself family photographer, picking up the camcorder her father never let anyone touch. "Just being in the house he would record us. Little things. I mean not just Christmas, but an ordinary winter day," she says. He even filmed them sleeping.

Each sister dealt with the loss in her own way. Tiffany took on a co-parenting role; Ashley, the middle child, kept more to herself. Little Kimberly wrote a book about the dad she never knew. And they passed from bedroom to bedroom a poster-sized photograph of their parents, clearly in love, their heads touching.

For Tiffany the tragedy also unearthed secrets she was never supposed to know — changing the image of who her father was and further confusing her.

When Sita applied for benefits and widows' funds she discovered that Vishnoo had been married in Trinidad and, because of a botched divorce, still was. He had three daughters with that wife, who was fighting for his assets, even claiming ownership of half the house.

Tiffany watched her mother tangle with bureaucracies and lawyers. She herself was in a titanic battle with adolescence, a jumble of feelings that left her sorry for her mother and mad at her all at once.

When Tiffany was 13, Charlie Gool came on the scene, a man her mother had been married to in Guyana before she met Vishnoo. Tiffany says she rebelled, mouthing off. No one would replace her father. An aunt intervened. "Don't you want your mom to be happy? Look at her."

In time, Tiffany says, she came to respect Charlie. She lectured her younger sisters to do the same. At the big Sweet 16 party her mom threw for her, Charlie played stepdad. Tiffany appreciated the effort and let him walk her into the ballroom, but still there is a part of her that waits for Vishnoo.

Lately, she's been having this recurring dream: Her father gets hit on the head and she sees him on the street. She tries to talk to him but he doesn't remember her. "Who are you?" he says — and then she wakes up.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-children-20110909,0,2058949,print.story

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Remembering the heroes of Flight 93

Ten years after the United Airlines flight was hijacked and crashed into a remote area in Pennsylvania, a memorial to the 40 crew members and passengers who died will be unveiled.

by Patrick Lester, Morning Call

September 8, 2011

Reporting from Shanksville, Pa.

In the remote, rolling hills near this tiny southwestern Pennsylvania borough, signs of the thunderous jolts that shook the town on Sept. 11, 2001, and then rippled across the world have mostly faded.

The 40-foot-deep crater created by the chaotic, 500-mph descent of United Airlines Flight 93 has long been covered. Nearby, wildflowers blanket the 60-plus acres that serve as a burial ground for 40 crew members and passengers.

A serene walkway overlooks the seasonal blooms and leads to a granite wall inscribed with the names of all who were aboard Flight 93.

It took 10 years, but the National Park Service's Flight 93 National Memorial in Stonycreek Township will be unveiled Saturday during events that are expected to draw 10,000 people, including President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

It's been a long time coming for families of the Flight 93 crew and passengers, who were hailed as heroes for their impromptu uprising against the terrorists who hijacked their flight.

"It's been fascinating just watching it all develop and take form and shape," said Ed Root of Coopersburg, Pa., whose cousin, Lorraine Bay of East Windsor, N.J., was a senior flight attendant on board. "In some respects, this finished memorial is more for the future than it is for the present."

Root first visited the site on a dreary March day, six months after Bay, a 58-year-old who was known to mother her younger colleagues, had chosen Flight 93 over another because it was nonstop from Newark to San Francisco.

"It was numbing," Root, 64, recalled. Growing up, Root and Bay spent many holidays together as well as vacations at the New Jersey shore.

"She was kind of the big sister I never had," said Root, who has no siblings. "I looked up to her as a teenager."

Root was so moved by his first visit that he eventually served on a committee that selected the memorial design, was for years a member of the Families of Flight 93 organization and has made frequent trips here to monitor progress of the project's $62-million first phase.

He plans to be here Saturday with hundreds of other relatives of Flight 93 victims. The opening ceremony marks the completion of the initial phase of the project — about half of what is planned.

The memorial features a cast concrete gateway leading to a 900-foot-long walkway that offers vistas of the flower-covered "Sacred Ground" that absorbed the impact of the crash.

At the end of the walkway is a black granite wall listing the names of crew members and passengers. A Field of Honor will eventually be framed with groves of maple trees and a walking path.

Future plans include a visitors center between two large concrete walls that designate Flight 93's final path; a 93-foot-high "Tower of Voices" with 40 wind chimes near the park entrance; and 40 memorial groves, each with 40 trees.

California architect Paul Murdoch had in mind the courage of the passengers and crew when he designed the memorial.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers downed the plane in Pennsylvania as the hostages, who had learned of the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., revolted.

"We used the large scale of the open site to give a heroic quality to the memorial, creating a long, arching walkway around a Field of Honor," Murdoch said. "We used the serenity of the rural landscape to inform the memorial expression as a cemetery, while working with the severity of the site's exposure and mining history to recognize it as a battleground."

Even in its temporary state, the park has attracted visitors from all 50 states and places as far as Africa, Romania and the Netherlands.

Root said it's not unusual to see visitors patting their pocket or reaching into their purses to leave behind something personal.

Firefighters, police officers and medics leave their company patches. Children leave toys. Bay's husband, Erich, leaves an arrangement of flowers on each of his visits: four yellow roses for flight crew members and one red rose for his late wife. More than 35,000 tributes have been left behind and become part of a stored archival collection.

Root thinks visitors will find the new memorial a contemplative place where they'll ask themselves, "What would I have done?"

"Many people believe that if the plane was in the air a few more seconds, it would have hit the town and every child in town was in school that day," Root said. The flight crew and passengers "knew if they didn't act that something far worse would happen."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-shanksville-memorial-20110909,0,894604,print.story

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Counter-terrorism becomes part of law enforcement

Since Sept. 11, local policing has been reshaped — with officers studying Taliban tactics, traveling overseas and reaching out to Muslim communities in the U.S. Some wonder if it's working.

by Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times

September 6, 2011

On a sunny afternoon this summer, dozens of Los Angeles police officers converged on the Iman Cultural Center and mosque in West Los Angeles.

They brought bureaucratic swag — pens and mugs emblazoned with the LAPD insignia — and then, accompanied by a smiling Chief Charlie Beck, crowded into a banquet hall in a blue swarm of friendly handshakes and words of welcome and fellowship.

When it was his turn at the microphone, Deputy Chief Michael Downing added another point: that the LAPD values its relationship with Muslim communities and wants people to continue to reach out if they suspect someone they know is becoming radicalized.

Photos: The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001

The event was a sign of how terrorism concerns have reshaped local policing in the decade since 9/11.

From the New York Police Department to small rural sheriff's departments, agencies have added counter-terrorism to their traditional crime-fighting duties — a shift that has cost billions of dollars and changed not just the equipment police use, but the way they approach law enforcement.

Police officers now monitor extremist chat rooms, study the tactics and weaponry of the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents, and travel to Muslim countries to develop their own intelligence.

The NYPD has more than 1,000 officers engaged in counter-terrorism, including a dozen based overseas. It recruits foreign-born New Yorkers and trains them in secret for undercover work.

In Los Angeles, 700 police officers work in the LAPD's Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, including some who speak Urdu and Arabic. That's more than twice as many officers as are assigned to any police station in the city, even those in the highest-crime areas.

Local police also team up with federal authorities at 72 "fusion centers" around the country, where experts from an alphabet soup of agencies work in adjoining cubicles to analyze "suspicious activity reports." They look for unusual trends, unexpected behaviors and other potential clues that deserve further investigation.

Outreach to Muslim communities is a major thrust of police counter-terrorism efforts. The NYPD sponsors cricket leagues that help develop relationships with young people from Pakistan and other Islamic countries. LAPD representatives meet regularly with Muslim leaders.

"I would sum it up in one quick sentence, and that is: Traditionally law enforcement has not had any direct responsibility for national security, and now we do," said Michael Grossman, chief of the homeland security division at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "And that changes a lot … of what we do."

Local police have helped uncover or foil alleged terrorist plots in several cities, from Torrance, Calif., to Seattle, and no large-scale attack has succeeded anywhere in the United States. But it's a matter of debate whether that is because of smarter policing, an alert public or blind luck.

Police quickly found the Pakistani-born man who tried to detonate a massive car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. But it was a street vendor who first reported smoke pouring from a parked car; the bomb had been ignited but failed to explode. (NYPD officials said they thought the bomb may have faltered in part because they do such a good job of flagging explosives sales in the region, causing the bomber to resort to less effective explosives.)

New York police conduct random bag inspections in the subways to search for bombs or weapons. Has it stopped any terrorists?

"Who knows? We may have deterred people," said Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department.

The evidence appeared clearer this summer in Killeen, Texas, which is adjacent to the Ft. Hood military base. On July 27, police in Killeen arrested Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, who was absent without leave from another Army base, on charges that he was planning to bomb fellow soldiers.

The tip came from Greg Ebert, a retired cop working at the nearby Guns Galore shop, who got an "uncomfortable feeling" when Abdo showed up in a taxi for a shopping spree that included three boxes of ammunition.

Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan purchased a semiautomatic pistol at the same shop and is accused of using it to kill 13 people and wound 29 others at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

Ebert said he grew suspicious when Abdo bought canisters of smokeless gunpowder but didn't seem to know what they were.

Local police and the FBI responded quickly. After conducting surveillance, authorities raided Abdo's motel room and found what they described as a trove of bomb-making materials. He was immediately arrested.

In addition to fighting attacks, police are working to improve relationships.

At the LAPD, one face of Muslim outreach is Officer Chand Syed, 26, a Saudi-born UC Irvine graduate of Pakistani descent who speaks Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi. After a chance meeting at a wedding, Downing plucked Syed from his job patrolling the North Hollywood Division and installed him at a desk in the counter-terrorism office on the 10th floor of LAPD headquarters.

Despite the gun holstered at his hip, Syed's daily activities sound like a textbook description of community organizing. He buzzes all over Southern California meeting with representatives from Muslim communities. One group wants help negotiating parking for Friday prayers. Another wants help putting together an art exhibit. Yet another wants advice on how to donate money to Islamic charities without running afoul of the law.

"I meet people," he said. "I'm an ambassador for the LAPD."

Some officials have expressed concern about the new counter-terrorism focus, particularly about aspects of the training that tens of thousands of law enforcement officials have undergone.

The LAPD's Downing, head of the department's counter-terrorism operations, said that some police departments have paid for courses that peddle rumors and misinformation, including false claims that American Muslims want to impose sharia, or strict Islamic law, in the United States.

Some departments "just hire the guy that has the sexiest, most heroic story to teach their cops," he said. "… It's just a travesty."

Other officials worry that traditional policing has suffered in the push to guard against attacks involving biological agents, massive explosions or other unlikely events.

"Something is lost," said Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard. "The priority or the emphasis goes toward events that are possible, but may be less likely than other public safety [issues] such as gang activity or community policing."

In the Los Angeles area, the daily grind of counter-terrorism takes place behind a locked door above a Bally Total Fitness gym in Norwalk. It is the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, one of the fusion centers created to overcome the bureaucratic "silos" that had sometimes kept local, state and federal agencies from sharing critical information.

FBI officials refused to discuss many specific cases, but LAPD officials pointed to 2009 case in which a Pakistani-born woman pleaded guilty to federal identity theft charges in a case involving selling fake driver's licenses. Names of some of the woman's alleged customers had surfaced in other national security operations, LAPD officials said.

"We have no idea how many thousands of people might be out there with these documents," LAPD Det. Mark Severino, who helped run the investigation, said at the time. "If we're talking about counter-terrorism issues, that's a scary thought. How do you track a man with a valid license and the name Rios?"

Last year, the Los Angeles fusion center received more than 2,300 reports, FBI officials said, many of them false alarms. The terrorism liaison in Escondido, north of San Diego, called federal agents earlier this summer, for example, after someone showed up at City Hall and began asking questions about the city's water system.

He turned out to be an enthusiastic water-system parts salesman, not a terrorist.

Fusion centers in Texas and Missouri have been criticized for urging police to monitor nonviolent political and religious activists. In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union decried a threat assessment from a Virginia fusion center warning that historically black colleges could be hubs for terrorist recruitment.

"This superstructure has been built, the authority has been granted … but there is no evidence that any of that is actually making anybody safer," said Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the ACLU in Washington. He warned that the centers could be "a breeding ground for overzealous police intelligence activities."

Government authorities deny the accusation. "We are very careful to never violate civil liberties," said Leslie Gardner, an FBI agent who heads the Los Angeles fusion center.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-homeland-security-enforcement-20110907,0,5656820,print.story

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9/11: A decade after -- Thinking outside the 'Muslim bubble'

Many American Muslims have hunkered down since Sept. 11, fearful of the anti-Islamic backlash. But some have found that reaching out to non-Muslim neighbors in small ways can have big results.

by Raja Abdulrahim and Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

September 3, 2011

Maria Khani was at her computer that September morning, working on an Arabic textbook. The small TV on the desk was turned to Al Jazeera. Suddenly, news came: A plane had struck the World Trade Center. Minutes later, she watched the screen as the second plane hit.

Khani sat frozen, questions racing through her mind: "Oh, my God, what do I do right now? Is everything that I built … gone?"

For five years, she had been planting the seeds of goodwill with Americans of other faiths. What if it was all for naught?

Unlike many Muslims who hunkered down after Sept. 11 and let national religious organizations defend their rights and make their case in the public square, Khani resolved not to retreat into the safety of silence, but to press on with her efforts over the years to become a part of her community, one neighbor at a time.

When Khani walked out of her house that day in a well-to-do Huntington Beach neighborhood, on a block of large houses and palm-shaded driveways, neighbors approached with no hint of rancor or suspicion. Their message: "We know who you are, we know about your faith, and we support you and we will take care of your kids."

This was not the experience of every Muslim American. Many recall the first months and years after Sept. 11 with dread: the detentions, the airport searches, the suspicious stares, racist epithets and worse. In response, some sought safety in a low profile.

The decade since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has seen a shift in the way many American Muslims negotiate their delicate position as a minority group associated, fairly or unfairly, with the perpetrators of the deadliest acts of terrorism in the nation's history.

As the years wore on and the hostility continued, even intensified, a number of American Muslims became disenchanted with the official campaigns for acceptance. They began to see that a voice — their voice — was missing from the conversation about Muslims' place in America.

They took matters into their own hands. Their efforts have been as idiosyncratic as the individuals involved. They have been as simple as inviting a non-Muslim neighbor to an iftar, the sunset meal that breaks the fast during the monthlong observance of Ramadan. They have been as life-changing as making a commitment to educate one's children in a religiously diverse public school instead of a Muslim private school.

Khani and others involved in such outreach attempts believe — and this is supported by opinion surveys — that Americans are less likely to harbor anti-Muslim feelings if they get to know even one Muslim.

When they do, they find that American Muslims, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, share with them many of the same values, including a rejection of extremist violence, appreciation of hard work and support for women taking an active role in society, according to polls.

Remarkably, despite a decade of turbulence and a sputtering economy, Muslim Americans are far more likely than others to be optimistic about the nation's future.

'A wonderful family'

There was a moment 10 years ago that Khani now remembers with an approving smile.

It came a few weeks after the attacks, when neighbor Patti Markowitz was washing her car in her driveway and two FBI agents approached. They began asking questions about Khani and her family, angering Markowitz. She still remembers what she said.

"We love having them on our street," she told the agents. "The family is a wonderful family."

Markowitz didn't tell Khani about the incident until months later, not wanting to upset her.

"I had already established a strong relationship," Khani said. "Doing that made a big difference."

Khani's daughter, Dania Alkhouli, was then in eighth grade at Ethel Dwyer Middle School, her local public school. Like her mother, she wore a hijab, a Muslim head scarf. At school, she felt enveloped by support from the principal and teachers, some she didn't even know.

The previous year, Khani, 48, had begun a tradition of cooking an appreciation lunch — usually food from her native Syria — for the staff at Ethel Dwyer. As she always told fellow Muslims: Get out there — be a part of American society. Get to know your neighbors. And for those who might consider it, enroll your kids in public school.

After the attacks, she could see the payoff. Friends told her stories of harassment. Newspapers were full of those stories. It wasn't her experience.

Born to Syrian parents in England, where her father was an ambassador, Khani lived in France, the Netherlands, India and Syria, often attending Catholic schools. She grew accustomed to quickly integrating into a new society. She moved to the United States with her husband, Hassan Alkhouli, an intensive-care doctor, 24 years ago.

The family, including two sons, has sometimes had to make adjustments for Khani's busy schedule. She goes to interfaith meetings; speaks at schools, churches and synagogues; volunteers at a social services clinic in Anaheim; and serves on the Tustin police advisory board, which sought her out even though she lives elsewhere.

"I look around and I see so many Muslims in our community not doing anything, so when I see my mom rushing around doing things, I get it," said daughter Dania, now 22. "It just builds this reputation: OK, maybe Muslims really aren't that bad."

Khani believes that perceptions of Islam have worsened in the last year. Her response has been to beat the drum of integration even louder.

She can't claim overwhelming success. She has found that many Muslims, especially in the large immigrant communities of Orange County, are content to be socially isolated from the wider culture.

Her victories come one person at a time.

Thirteen years ago, neighbor Maxine Cooper had major surgery. While she was at home recuperating, Khani appeared at her door with dinner — from soup to dessert, enough to last for days. Their friendship endures to this day.

Another time, when the neighborhood kids were playing outside, Khani ordered pizzas, spread a blanket in her garage and called the kids to come eat. A neighbor watched from across the street, and then walked over, expressing pleasant surprise.

Most Americans aren't interested in listening to officials from Muslim groups, Khani said. They want to see what individual Muslims are doing.

"And we are not doing enough. Once we have Islamophobia going on, it means we didn't do enough," she said. "We are doing things, but like a turtle's [pace]. I don't want a turtle; I want a kangaroo."

'Wake up'

On a warm Friday night in August, a petite woman strode to the pulpit of St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, dressed in black slacks and a hot-pink and black tunic, with highlights in her short brown hair.

"In Islam," she began, "we're taught that justice is what we should be struggling for. And as progressive Muslims, we believe that justice needs to prevail for everyone — not just straight people."

The speaker was Ani Zonneveld, a singer, producer and self-described progressive Muslim. Her interfaith audience had gathered on the eve of the annual OC Pride festival, a celebration of gay rights, and Zonneveld, 48, was voicing sentiments rarely associated with Islam.

She began to sing of ummah , or "community": "Come, my ummah, wake up, our jihad is long overdue. Come, my ummah, wake up, coz you and I have much to do."

It is easy to imagine the circumstances in which such lyrics would be less than fully appreciated. But this was a friendly crowd that included Christians, Jews, Buddhists and pagans. Zonneveld made a point of explaining that the Arabic word "jihad" means "struggle," and not necessarily the kind of violent struggle that has come to be associated with radical Islam.

Her audience sang along.

This, for Zonneveld, is what it means to be Muslim in America after Sept. 11 — tolerating differences, breaking stereotypes, finding a voice.

The desire to reach out began incubating just after Sept. 11, but she didn't act on it until much later. The catalyst was a confluence of events.

One was the rise of the conservative "tea party." Activists from the movement were prominent in the attempt to stop plans for an Islamic center and mosque near the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

Similar battles erupted over new mosques in Riverside County and elsewhere. About the same time, a movement arose in more than a dozen states to ban the application of Sharia law.

Finally, there was the threat by a Florida pastor to burn the Koran.

The hatred had become tangible, Zonneveld decided.

Last fall, after a friend's son was attacked on a school bus for being Muslim, she knew she had to do something.

The result was a soon-to-be-released book, a collection of essays and poems titled "Progressive Muslim Identities." It features writers who are gay or transgender, feminists, converts and people married to non-Muslims.

As Zonneveld demonstrates, no community is monolithic.

Born in Malaysia and raised in Germany, India and Egypt, she grew up in what she called a traditional but pragmatic family that didn't try to impose its beliefs on others. Today, she remains a practicing Muslim but is far from orthodox. Her husband is non-Muslim, but she insisted they raise their daughter, now 13, as a Muslim.

Nowhere, she said, did she see an organization that represented her ideal of a progressive, inclusive Islam. She helped found a group, Muslims for Progressive Values, which supports gay rights and gay marriage, advocates for female prayer leaders and supports women marrying outside the faith.

Zonneveld said she wrote "Ummah, Wake Up," in anger at extremists and those who claim to speak for all the Muslim faithful. The song, she said, was a challenge to the Muslim American community "to rethink our belief system."

"Ummah, Wake up" was just one of those songs that came very quickly," she said. "I think it's just been brewing inside of me. What I've seen and what I've read has been percolating in my head and in my blood."

'Get involved'

After a monthlong food drive he organized at a mosque last year, Omar Ahmed spent an afternoon moving more than 1,000 items into his van to take to the Foothill Family Shelter.

A man from the mosque walked over and asked where the food was going. When Ahmed told him, he asked: Why don't you give it to the Muslims?

"It was just kind of upsetting to hear that. As a community … I don't think we do enough work outside the Muslim community," he said. "A person in need is a person in need regardless of faith or race."

For Ahmed, it epitomized the problem of what he called the "Muslim bubble."

He and his wife, Dunia Ramadan, had heard similar sentiments in other Muslim organizations, experiences that left them a little wary of the tendency of some Muslims to keep other Americans at arm's length.

"We wanted to move away from being isolated in the Muslim community and get involved in our greater community," said Ramadan, a 27-year-old statistician who grew up in Boston with Lebanese parents. "We really felt like it was a big bubble and that we needed to move past that."

Less than a year after the couple married in 2008 and moved to Upland, they began a book club about civic engagement. They chose books that would foster their growing interest in the integrated role they believed Muslims must play in the U.S.

After a year — as the tea party was growing in influence, and protests were forming outside the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site — the club's half-dozen members were eager to translate their readings into action.

Ramadan wondered: "Would people really be thinking so badly about Muslims if they were really involved in their community?"

In the last two years, she has joined interfaith groups and over the last year has given invocations at a high school graduation and several city council meetings, and she joined the Claremont Committee on Human Relations.

Ahmed, who was born in India and moved to the U.S. at 5, said his outreach was based on prophetic teachings that emphasize the need to serve others.

For the last year, the couple have been part of a group called M&M, for Muslims & Methodists. It began when a member of the Claremont United Methodist Church reached out to Ramadan.

Unlike interfaith groups that are organized around meetings or social service events, the M&M group revolves around a monthly potluck. There is no real agenda; the members just socialize, learning about one another along the way.

The Methodist members at one point got a quick lesson in Muslim dietary laws, shopping at a halal grocery for foods their Muslim counterparts would eat.

At a recent dinner at a home in Fontana, the group's dozen or so members sat around tables pushed together, digging into lentil soup, spicy meat, green beans and rice.

Ahmed, slightly hunched over his plate, talked about wanting to improve the weekly food bags he and his wife began putting together for the homeless a year ago to serve their community.

"And when you say 'your community,' what do you mean by that?" Alex Morales asked carefully, glasses low on his nose.

"The whole community, anyone, Muslim or not Muslim," said Ahmed, 32, who owns a medical software company.

Morales paused before saying, "Before this, it would not have occurred to me that the Muslim community would try to help someone who isn't Muslim." He added: "The general public, I think, would be a little more like me and be surprised to hear that."

The comment — upsetting to both Ramadan and Ahmed — underscored what they already felt: that more Muslims must reach beyond their community and engage with other Americans.

But in an echo of his own experience, Ahmed sees more Muslims coming to a social awakening.

" People say it's about time we talk about these issues, and that gives me hope, " he said. " Whether they're moving in that direction or not, they're thinking in that direction, and that's good. "

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-muslim-america-20110904,0,4162852,print.story

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Eyewitness testimony done right

The New Jersey Supreme Court has instructed police and judges to take into account an array of responses that might prevent mistaken identifications. California should do the same.

September 8, 2011

To many Americans — including many jurors — eyewitness testimony is the gold standard when it comes to evidence. But studies demonstrate that a variety of factors can lead to the misidentification of criminals. Nationally, more than 75% of convictions that have been overturned because of DNA evidence involved erroneous eyewitness testimony. Now the influential New Jersey Supreme Court has instructed police and judges to take into account an array of responses that might prevent mistaken identifications.

Ruling in the case of a man convicted of manslaughter and aggravated assault, the court noted that several variables can produce mistaken eyewitness testimony. They range from photo lineups in which none of the other images resembles the suspect to subtle pressure on a witness from an officer who knows which picture is the correct one. Finally, a witness may have more difficulty making a correct identification when he and the suspect are of different races.

The court tried to deter false identification with a stepped process. Once a suspect has established that he was the victim of suggestiveness, a pretrial hearing will be held in which the full range of reasons for possible misidentification are examined. If a judge finds the eyewitness testimony unreliable, he can suppress its use at trial. Even if he allows it, he will have to instruct the jury about the variables that can lead to misidentification.

Police in some California counties use some of the methods recommended by the New Jersey court and by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. For example, 21 police departments in the state conduct "blind" photo lineups, in which the person administering the viewing doesn't know who the suspect is. (The Los Angeles Police Department does not conduct blind photo lineups, nor does it follow the commission's related recommendation that witnesses be shown photos one at a time. It does make sure that photos in a lineup resemble one another.) Judges in California routinely talk to jurors about the possibility of misidentification, but their instructions aren't as complete as those contemplated by the New Jersey court.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation that, among other things, would have set up a task force to examine eyewitness testimony and establish voluntary guidelines to ensure that it was accurate. A new version of that legislation, AB 308, is pending in the state Senate, though passage in this session is unlikely. It should be revived and approved. If New Jersey can have statewide guidelines, so can California.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-eyewitness-20110908,0,7282809,print.story

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From Google News

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Wisconsin

Waukesha Citizens Academy Week 2 - Community Policing Involves Everyone

Did you know that when you are out for a stroll at Frame Park, walking along the streets of downtown Waukesha or taking the kids to Horeb Spring Park, there are cameras watching you?

It's not as scary as it sounds. But there are seven OptiCop cameras that feed into the dispatch center at the Waukesha Police Department to keep an extra, visual watch on Frame Park, the downtown and Horeb Spring Park.

Great, so the dispatchers probably saw that spur-of the moment dance when a good jam came on my iPod while I was in Frame Park...

Sgt. Gregg Satula led the Waukesha Citizens Police Academy through the awesome capabilities that the program that allows dispatch to monitor the areas and keep a camera trained to specific situations when a call comes.

“This is seven extra eyes in the city,” Satula said.

The program has the opportunity to expand and while costs money to build the infrastructure, it saves the city significant money from hiring extra police officers to increase patrols in the high activity areas. As technology changes and advances, there will be different opportunities that can arise from the system.

Another direction that the police department can go with the program is using police reserve officers to voluntarily monitor the cameras, especially for big events like the upcoming Christmas parade.

The OptiCop has been useful in capturing video recordings of arrests, drunken drivers, an elderly man driving his vehicle into the Fox River and the apartment building fire on North Street, among many other incidents.

Community Policing

Waukesha has a community policing unit that is dedicated to working with proactive programs that works closely with area citizens.

But that's the key - the police department relies on everyone to report suspicious activity and area crimes in order to keep a watch on areas in the community.

“The truth is, if we don't have you guys helping out, we aren't going to be able to solve a lot of these crimes,” said Police Officer Dave Daily, who works in the community policing unit.

Some of those programs include working with more than 150 landlords to inform them about incidents that occur at more than 400 different properties throughout the city. The program has resulted in more than 300 evictions since the program started in the mid-2000s, including a handful of evictions this year.

Keeping in contact with the landlords of rental properties works hand-in-hand with the city's nuisance ordinance. For properties that have received three calls that result in a citation or an arrest in a month or six calls that result in a citation or an arrest in a year, the property owner has to address the situation in writing to Police Chief Jack. If the property owner fails to fix the situation, they could be fined $1,000 a day until the problem ceases to exist.

However, if your neighbor contacts the police about false or petty claims several times in a month, that doesn't mean that the property owner is going to automatically start getting fined for a nuisance violation.

“It has to either be a citation or an arrest,” Daily said.

Each week Waukesha Patch editor Sarah Millard is participating in Waukesha Citizens Academy to learn about various facets of the police department's operations. Next week's class is about the history of the police department and the drug unit.

http://waukesha.patch.com/articles/waukesha-citizens-academy-week-2-community-policing-involves-everyone

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Syracuse police start programs to battle burglaries, help areas most in need

The first program will send officers to do a safety assessment on occupied homes that have been burglarized, said Police Chief Frank Fowler. The suggestions might include trimming down a hedge hiding a window or replacing the locks.

These assessments will be done within days after a burglary is reported, the chief said.

This won't change the response to a burglary when it happens. An officer will still respond to take a police report and investigate the crime.

But now, a community service officer will respond later to do the assessment, Fowler said.

It's part of a citywide crackdown on burglaries that police said has had results. So far, 1,080 burglaries have been reported in Syracuse this year, compared to 1,452 during the same period last year, according to department statistics.

However, the percentage of copper and scrap metal thefts is up, due to the weak economy and high value of metals, Fowler said. He urged owners of unoccupied homes to keep alarm systems on even if there are no possessions in the home to prevent thefts of copper pipe and other metal.

The second program will flood police resources into small areas — only a few blocks in size — that have persistent problems, Fowler said.

Dubbed “Sweep,” or Strategic Waves of Enforcement by Police, the program is underway in an undisclosed neighborhood, Fowler said.

Officers picked the area by studying police calls and then surveying residents about the biggest problems. Then community policing officers focus on solving those issues, with help from others on the force.

For example, if there's a drug problem, the narcotics squad would get involved. For prostitutes, it would be vice squad. The gang task force would help out with gang problems.

Fowler said there are 25 to 30 areas in the city that have been identified for the program, but they are focusing on one right now.

Once police believe the problem has been solved, they will interview the residents again, the chief said.

http://blog.syracuse.com/news/print.html?entry=/2011/09/syracuse_police_start_programs.html

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Mom abandons 4 kids at restaurant

September 8, 2011

by Myra McCain

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - A Fort Wayne mother was charged with neglect Wednesday after leaving her four children at a Burger King restaurant while they used the restroom.

According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Allen Superior Court Wednesday, Monique Antionette Mays, 26, and her children, ages, eight, six, six, and five were walking in the downtown area around 3 p.m. Monday, when they told her they needed to use the restroom.

While at the corner of Barr Street and Washington Boulevard, Mays told her children to use the restroom at the Burger King restaurant nearby and she would wait for them at the intersection.

When the children returned to the Barr and Washington intersection, they were unable to find their mother.

They returned to the Burger King in case she had gone there to meet them, but still could not find her.

The children told police Mays had threatened to abandon them so that she could have alone time with her boyfriend.

At the time of the incident, police checked numerous locations to find Mays, but those were unsuccessful. Police were also not able to find any suitable relative to take the children to, and were placed in foster care instead.

http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/mom-abandons-4-kids-at-restaurant

The New Surveillance Society: How "Community" Policing Follows Your Every Move

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland" is a collaborative project with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.

Surveillance now is everyone's business, as the line between intelligence-gathering and crimefighting rapidly fades and the public is conditioned to play its part.

The work of Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) exemplifies the new surveillance paradigm. The head of the 750-strong counterterrorism force within the LAPD, he is on the hunt for "people who follow al-Qaeda's goals and objectives and mission and ideology." He says his officers collect intelligence and practice the "essence of community policing" by reaching out to Muslims and asking them to "weed out" the "hard-core radicals."

He adds that he is pleased that many Muslims have adopted the LAPD's iWatch program and are prepared, along with the general public, to call in tips about suspicious activity. With "violent Islamists" as his main target, Chief Downing is also keeping track of "black separatists, white supremacist/sovereign citizen extremists and animal rights terrorists." If threats materialize, he can draw upon the LAPD's "amazing" backup capacity - SWAT units, direct-action teams, air support, counterassault teams and squads that specialize in disrupting vehicle bombs.

Here we see several of the components of the new surveillance society. A militarized police force no longer leaves intelligence work to federal authorities. It seeks out information about anything that can be connected to "suspicious" activity and is keeping track of certain individuals and groups whether or not there is evidence that they are engaging in criminal activity. Police are expected to chase down unsubstantiated tips from the public, and not just to pursue evidence of wrongdoing. A new notion of "community policing" has emerged, where monitoring communities - with all the trust issues that this implies - has taken the place of winning community support by being accountable to residents and solving crimes.

The LAPD is one of some 3,984 federal, state and local agencies now collecting information about "suspicious activity" that could be related to terrorism. The Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series states that 854,000 people now hold "top-secret" security clearance. We estimate that's about one for every 215 working-age Americans. An additional 3 million people reportedly hold "secret" security clearance.

The federal government spends more annually on civilian and military intelligence than the rest of the world put together - $80 billion is a conservative figure, according to the October 28, 2010, Post. This is in addition to the $42-plus billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the spending on intelligence activities by the LAPD and other state and local police forces. The homeland security industry is flourishing, with lucrative contracts being awarded to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other major defense contractors.

What exactly is being built with these funds?

The "Information Sharing Environment"

Essentially, the "total information awareness" assumption that the nation can be made safe by applying advanced technology to massive databases has been married to the call for a "unity of effort in sharing information" issued by the bipartisan 9/11 National Commission. The commissioners had recommended a fundamental change in how the nation's 16 intelligence agencies carried out their business. They urged that the "need to know" culture be replaced with a "need to share" imperative, with information being transmitted horizontally among agencies, not just vertically within agencies. They further recommended that the FBI be equipped to assume prime responsibility for domestic intelligence-gathering, that it incorporate a "specialized and integrated national security workforce," and that it form collaborative relationships with state and local police for this purpose.

To construct a new domestic surveillance network, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandated the creation of an Information Sharing Environment (ISE) under the director of national intelligence. Defined as "an interrelated set of policies, processes and systems," ISE was intended to facilitate the sharing of terrorism-related information with stakeholders at all levels of government and the private sector. Eventually, foreign governments are supposed to be brought into the ISE loop. The ISE requires the standardization of information systems and technology to provide access to the burgeoning number of databases that serve as its connective tissue, the enlistment of mission partners across federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and the private sector to keep the databases supplied with the information that is its lifeblood, and the use of "analysts, operators and investigators" from "law enforcement, public safety, homeland security, intelligence, defense and foreign affairs" to extract, analyze and disseminate timely intelligence.

Fusion Centers and Suspicious Activity Reports

The nerve centers of the ISE are the nation's 72 regional and state fusion centers, which were in part a response to the FBI's reluctance to share threat information with state and local law enforcement because of turf and security clearance issues. With considerable variation in what they do and how they do it, fusion centers were established over the past seven years with DHS funding to "fuse" and analyze information from a wide variety of sources and databases and facilitate information-sharing among themselves through the FBI's eGuardian database. The secretive fusion centers represent a significant departure from traditional law enforcement objectives and methods, with few legal limits on what they can and cannot do, little respect for long-established jurisdictional boundaries between local, state, federal, military and private entities and a notable absence of accountability mechanisms. Given the scarcity of domestic terrorism plots, it is not surprising that most fusion centers almost immediately changed the focus of their data collection from fighting terrorism to a broad "all crimes, all hazards" mission. Many now use federal counterterrorism funds to collect, store and share data that has little or no relation to terrorism and, often, no relation to actual crimes.

According to DHS head Janet Napolitano, along with fusion centers, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative serves as the "heart" of the government's effort to keep Americans safe from "homegrown terrorism." The idea behind the initiative is to collect as much data about anything "suspicious" that just may (or may not) be related to criminal activity. Or, to quote the government's own alarmingly broad definition: a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is "official documentation of observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering, or preoperational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention."

SARS programs, piloted by the LAPD, Boston and a handful of other cities, vary from place to place and are often in competition with one another for federal dollars. Today some 800,000 state and local law enforcement officers are encouraged to file SARs on even the most common everyday behaviors, such as looking through binoculars, taking pictures of buildings, taking notes in public and espousing "radical" beliefs.

The ISE program manager recommended that SARs are reviewed within the police department before being sent to a fusion center for further review by an intelligence analyst. If it "meets SAR criteria," it is then entered into the ISE for wide distribution and "fusion with other intelligence information." But a January 2010 evaluation of the ISE and National SAR Reporting Initiative has shown little uniformity in how SARs are being collected, vetted and shared, and how much personably identifiable information is being aggregated and disseminated through the fusion center network and sent to the FBI’s eGUardian system, which is now serving as "an ISE/SAR shared space." In an effort to address criticisms voiced by civil liberties groups, ISE adopted a policy requiring that only behavior indicating some kind of connection to criminal activity or terrorism should be shared among federal intelligence agencies. But this civil rights protection does not apply to sharing by state and regional fusion centers.

A New Policing Paradigm

In addition to writing up SARS, police departments, often working directly with the FBI through its multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), sift "tips and leads" provided in field reports, through public tip lines, by private entities, by confidential and anonymous sources, or culled from media sources. Time that used to be spent investigating reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is now allocated to assessing randomly collected information to decide whether it is credible enough to be deposited in the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) and sent to the FBI’s eGuardian database for preliminary analysis before being sent to fusion centers for further analysis and wide distribution.

When local police work with the FBI in JTTFs, they become federal officers who are no longer under the supervision of and accountable to their local departments and communities, and instead must act in conformity with the FBI's guidelines on domestic investigations - regulations that are now so loose that they allow agents to conduct "assessments" involving monitoring of meetings and people, infiltration of groups, and personal interviews with no suspicion of wrongdoing - some 11,667 assessments were conducted just in the four-month period beginning in December 2009, with only a fraction leading to full investigations. And when local police participate with fusion centers in information collection and the building of personal files about activities that can be wholly innocent and may be constitutionally protected, they are integrated into a domestic surveillance network that is national in scope, beyond accountability, and far removed from community policing and public trust.

In the process, the line between traditional crimefighting and terrorism detection has been erased and something new has been born: a concept of policing that is no longer primarily reactive and focused on solving crimes or on collecting concrete evidence that a crime might be about to be committed. In "predictive policing," local police officers serve as a resource for gathering information on a range of potential threats and situations on the assumption that criminal activity can be stopped before it develops. They are trained to use advanced technologies and tools, including powerful surveillance cameras provided through DHS grants, to monitor broad sections of the population, looking for indicators of future crimes before they are committed.

When the net is cast so wide, everything and anything begins to look like "terrorism-related activity," forcing police officers to waste time checking out dead-end tips. It is not surprising that leaks from fusion centers have revealed that files compiled on individuals and groups are full of inaccurate information and focus on activities that may be both entirely innocent and constitutionally protected.

Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, told Congress in 2009 that fusion centers and SARs were worthy of the Soviet Union's KGB and East Germany's Stasi, and should be abandoned: "To an intelligence agent, informant, or law enforcement officer, everything unconventional or unorthodox looks like at least a pre-embryonic terrorist danger."

Nancy Murray is the author of Rights Matter: the Story of the Bill of Rights. Nancy holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a B.Phil. and Ph.D. in Modern History from Oxford University.

Kade Crockford is the ACLU of Massachusetts privacy rights coordinator.

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/152346

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