Homeless in Arizona

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Final shootout, then Boston bombing suspect caught

Associated Press Sat Apr 20, 2013 7:26 AM

WATERTOWN, Mass. — For just a few minutes, it seemed as if the dragnet that had shut down a metropolitan area of millions while legions of police went house to house looking for the suspected Boston Marathon bomber had failed.

Weary officials lifted a daylong order that had kept residents in their homes, saying it was fruitless to keep an entire city locked down. Then one man emerged from his home and noticed blood on the pleasure boat parked in his backyard. He lifted the tarp and found the wounded 19-year-old college student known the world over as Suspect No. 2.

Soon after that, the 24-hour drama that paralyzed a city and transfixed a nation was over.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capture touched off raucous celebrations in and around Boston, with chants of “USA, USA” as residents flooded the streets in relief and jubilation after four tense days since twin explosions ripped through the marathon’s crowd at the finish line, killing three people and wounding more than 180.

Will cops torture Boston Marathon bombing suspect to get answers???

President Barack Obama said there are many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings, including whether the two men had help from others. He urged people not to rush judgment about their motivations.

Dzhokhar and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, just outside Boston. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died early in the day of gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury. He was run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, according to investigators.

During a long night of violence Thursday and into Friday, the brothers killed an MIT police officer, severely wounded another lawman during a gun battle and hurled explosives at police in a desperate getaway attempt, authorities said.

Late Friday, less than an hour after authorities lifted the lockdown, they tracked down the younger man holed up in the boat, weakened by a gunshot wound after fleeing on foot from the overnight shootout with police that left 200 spent rounds behind.

The resident who spotted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his boat in his Watertown yard called police, who tried to persuade the suspect to get out of the boat, said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

“He was not communicative,” Davis said.

Instead, he said, there was an exchange of gunfire — the final volley of one of the biggest manhunts in American history.

The violent endgame unfolded just a day after the FBI released surveillance-camera images of two young men suspected of planting the pressure-cooker explosives at the marathon’s finish line, an attack that put the nation on edge for the week.

Watertown residents who had been told Friday morning to stay inside behind locked doors poured out of their homes and lined the streets to cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.

Celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Teenagers waved American flags. Drivers honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people cheered loudly.

“They finally caught the jerk,” said nurse Cindy Boyle. “It was scary. It was tense.”

Police said three other people were taken into custody for questioning at an off-campus housing complex at the University of the Massachusetts at Dartmouth where the younger man may have lived.

“Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its job,” said the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the bombing.

Queries cascaded in after authorities released the surveillance-camera photos — the FBI website was overwhelmed with 300,000 hits per minute — but what role those played in the overnight clash was unclear. State police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based on what the two men told a carjacking victim during their night of crime.

The search by thousands of law enforcement officers all but shut down the Boston area for much of the day. Officials halted all mass transit, including Amtrak trains to New York, advised businesses not to open and warned close to 1 million people in the city and some of its suburbs to unlock their doors only for uniformed police.

Around midday, the suspects’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., pleaded on television: “Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”

Until the younger man’s capture, it was looking like a grim day for police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the hunt and lifting the stay-indoors order across the region because they had come up empty-handed.

But then the break came and within a couple of hours, the search was over. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured about a mile from the site of the shootout that killed his brother.

A neighbor described how heavily armed police stormed by her window not long after the lockdown was lifted — the rapid gunfire left her huddled on the bathroom floor on top of her young son.

“I was just waiting for bullets to just start flying everywhere,” Deanna Finn said.

When at last the gunfire died away and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken from the neighborhood in an ambulance, an officer gave Finn a cheery thumbs-up.

“To see the look on his face, he was very, very happy, so that made me very, very happy,” she said.

Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 — the one in sunglasses and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures — was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Suspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap worn backward, was his younger brother.

Chechnya, where the brothers grew up, has been the scene of two wars between Russian forces and separatists since 1994, in which tens of thousands were killed in heavy Russian bombing. That spawned an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings in Russia and the region, although not in the West.

U.S. uses the Bible as “an excuse for invading other countries.”

Also, the FBI interviewed the older brother at the request of a foreign government in 2011, and nothing derogatory was found, according to a federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official did not identify the foreign country or say why it made the request.

Exactly how the long night of crime began was unclear. But police said the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a gas station.

They also shot to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a report of a disturbance, investigators said.

The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ran over his already wounded brother as he fled, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. At some point, he abandoned his car and ran away on foot.

The brothers had built an arsenal of pipe bombs, grenades and improvised explosive devices and used some of the weapons in trying to make their getaway, said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Watertown resident Kayla Dipaolo said she was woken up overnight by gunfire and a large explosion that sounded “like it was right next to my head … and shook the whole house.”

“It was very scary,” she said. “There are two bullet holes in the side of my house, and by the front door there is another.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev had studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston for three semesters from 2006 to 2008, the school said. He was married with a young daughter.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Students said he was on campus this week after the Boston Marathon bombing. The campus closed down Friday along with colleges around the Boston area.

The men’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said in a telephone interview with the AP from the Russian city of Makhachkala that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is “a true angel.” He said his son was studying medicine.

“He is such an intelligent boy,” the father said. “We expected him to come on holidays here.”

A man who said he knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed in Monday’s bombing, said he was glad Dzhokhar had survived.

“I didn’t want to lose more than one friend,” Marvin Salazar said.

“Why Jahar?” he asked, using Tsarnaev’s nickname. “I want to know answers. That’s the most important thing. And I think I speak for almost all America. Why the Boston Marathon? Why this year? Why Jahar?”

Two years ago, the city of Cambridge awarded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a $2,500 scholarship. At the time, he was a senior at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a highly regarded public school whose alumni include Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing.

Tsarni, the men’s uncle, said the brothers traveled here together from Russia. He called his nephews “losers” and said they had struggled to settle in the U.S. and ended up “thereby just hating everyone.”

———

Sullivan and Associated Press writers Stephen Braun, Jack Gillum and Pete Yost reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Mike Hill, Katie Zezima, Pat Eaton-Robb and Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Rodrique Ngowi in Watertown, Mass. and Jeff Donn in Cambridge, Mass., contributed to this report.

Criminalizing Children at School

Basically the government schools have become a jobs program for teachers, administrators, and cops and are run for the sake of the teachers, administrators, cops and unions, not the parents and children.

Now the cops seems to want to use recent shootings to turn the schools into a bigger jobs program for police officers. And this article addresses some of that.

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Criminalizing Children at School

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: April 18, 2013 13 Comments

The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation’s schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.

Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the ’80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.

The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study — by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland — also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.

Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.

In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.

The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)

Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children’s advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.

Sens. Graham, McCain say Tsarnaev should be sent to Guantanamo

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H. L. Mencken

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Sens. Graham, McCain say Tsarnaev should be sent to Guantanamo

By Richard A. Serrano

April 20, 2013, 10:33 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), said Saturday in a joint statement that alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be denied a defense attorney and declared an “enemy combatant.”

They added in a statement on Graham's Facebook page, "It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city.”

The two Republican conservatives have demanded that terror suspects not be Mirandized or tried in federal courts and instead be shipped to the detainee prison on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the Supreme Court has never said that a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil, like Tsarnaev, could be treated as an enemy combatant.

“The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans,” the senators said. “We need to know about any possible future attacks which could take additional American lives. The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.

"Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks."

In a separate tweet, Graham added, “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'"

Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night in Watertown, Mass. He was being held at a local hospital, and a Justice Department official said he likely would be charged later Saturday. Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney in Boston, invoked a “public safety exemption in cases of national security and potential charges involving acts of terrorism” as a reason not to immediately read him his Miranda rights against self-incrimination.

In 2011, a Justice Department memo expanded the use of the public safety exception in domestic terrorism cases, so that it can be invoked in exceptional circumstances even when there is not an imminent safety threat. The changes were made after a controversy over the handling of the suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 airline bomb attempt, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was questioned by FBI agents for less than an hour before being read his rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, said in a statement that “every criminal defendant” is entitled to Miranda rights, noting that Tsarnaev became a naturalized American citizen.

“The public safety exception should be read narrowly. It applies only when there is a continued threat to public safety and is not an open-ended exception to the Miranda rule,” the ACLU said. “Every criminal defendant has a right to be brought before a judge and to have access to counsel. We must not waver from our tried and true justice system, even in the most difficult of times. Denial of rights is un-American and will only make it harder to obtain fair convictions."

F*ck his Constitutional rights, he is a criminal!!!

Sadly the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect us from those very government tyrants who want to flush his 5th Amendment rights down the toilet.

Of course if you ask me I would tell Mr Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev to take the 5th and not say a word to the cops. It's his Constitutional right!

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Debate Over Delaying of Miranda Warning

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: April 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s announcement that it planned to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.

The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a naturalized American citizen, remained hospitalized on Saturday for treatment of injuries sustained when he was captured by the police on Friday night, and it was not clear whether he had been questioned yet. But the administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning about immediate threats to public safety in this and other terrorism cases has alarmed advocates of individual rights.

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that once the F.B.I. gets into broader questioning, it must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives have called for treating terrorism-related cases — even those arising on American soil or involving citizens — as a military matter, holding a suspect indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” without a criminal defendants’ rights. Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called for holding Mr. Tsarnaev under the laws of war, interrogating him without any Miranda warning or defense lawyer.

“Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks,” they said. “We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.”

The Miranda warning comes from a 1966 case in which the Supreme Court held that, to protect against involuntary self-incrimination, if prosecutors want to use statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first have advised him of his rights. The court later created an exception, allowing prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions about immediate threats to public safety, like where a gun is hidden.

The question applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to F.B.I. agents for 50 minutes before going into surgery.

After he awoke, the F.B.I. read Mr. Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning, and he stopped cooperating for several weeks.

Republicans portrayed the Obama administration’s handling of the case in the criminal justice system as endangering national security, setting the template for a recurring debate.

In late January 2010, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family and lawyer persuaded him to start talking again, and he provided a wealth of further information about Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Later, during pretrial hearings, his lawyers asked a federal judge, Nancy G. Edmunds, to suppress the early statements.

But Judge Edmunds ruled that the statement to the nurse had been voluntary and lucid despite the painkillers, and that the 50-minute questioning was a “fully justified” use of the public safety exception. She declined to suppress the statements, and Mr. Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

By then, the Justice Department had sent the F.B.I. a policy memo urging agents, when questioning “operational terrorists,” to use a broad interpretation of the public safety exception. The memo asserted that giving the “magnitude and complexity” of terrorism cases, a lengthier delay is permissible, unlike ordinary criminal cases.

“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example, questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” it said.

Judge Edmunds’s ruling was seen by the administration as confirmation that its new policy was constitutional — and that it was neither necessary nor appropriate to put domestic cases in military hands.

Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said the middle ground sought by the administration has put both the civil libertarian and national security conservative factions in a bind.

“This is the paradox of progressive national security law, which is how do you at once advocate for the ability of the civilian courts without accepting that some of that includes compromises that are problematic from a civil liberties perspective?” he said. “The paradox is just as true for the right, because they are ardent supporters of things like the public-safety exception, but its existence actually undermines the case for military commissions.”

US Air Force supports rapists????

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Abuse protest set at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:42 PM

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson has emerged as a focal point for national outrage over military justice since the placement there of a fighter pilot whose court-martial conviction for aggravated sexual assault was thrown out by his commander.

Lt. Col. James Wilkerson was transferred to Davis-Monthan amid a furor over the clemency decision following a sexual-assault verdict at Aviano Air Base in Italy.

Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group pressing for reforms in military rape prosecutions, announced plans for a demonstration at the Tucson base on Thursday attended by members of the accuser’s family.

Wilkerson was found guilty in November of an attack against Kim Hanks, a civilian contractor who said she was abused while sleeping in a guest room at his residence on the U.S. military base in Italy. Hanks has testified before Congress on her case and has granted media interviews. Wilkerson, a former Air Force inspector general, was sentenced to a year in detention plus dismissal from the armed forces.

However, in February, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, commander of the 3rd Air Force in Europe, overturned the conviction and reinstated Wilkerson. A court-martial is the military version of a criminal trial. Franklin acted under a clause of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that gives convening authorities “absolute power to disapprove the findings and sentence.”

Hanks testified that she joined a social gathering at the combat pilot’s house in March 2012 and missed her ride home. After being invited to spend the night, she said, she awoke to find Wilkerson in the bed assaulting her.

Wilkerson, who could not be reached for comment, has consistently denied the allegation. He has been supported by numerous officers who wrote letters on his behalf.

In a statement, Hanks described the clemency process as a travesty and the overturned conviction as “appalling and disappointing.”

“Gen. Franklin’s decision sent a message to every single victim of sexual assault out there that it’s probably not worth it to go through what I had to go through,” she added.

Some military personnel are decrying the outcome. On Monday, the Air Force Times published an interview with the prosecutor, who said he was so stunned when Franklin overturned the conviction that he turned to a colleague and blurted, “We just lost military justice.”

An Air Force spokesman said Franklin is not responding to media inquiries.

The Pentagon acknowledges that an estimated 19,000 sexual assaults take place annually in the armed forces. Only about 3,200 victims report the attacks. In 2011, fewer than 200 cases resulted in court-martial convictions. Critics say perpetrators are often protected by cronyism among officers, while victims fear that reporting attacks will lead to reprisals.

Under political pressure, Franklin issued a detailed explanation saying he had thoroughly reviewed the case file and clemency records before finding reasonable doubt as to Wilkerson’s guilt. He overturned the verdict against the advice of his own legal counsel. Wilkerson was then reassigned as safety officer at the air base in Tucson, where Hanks’ family resides.

Those decisions set off protests from lawmakers and others striving to combat rampant sexual abuse in the military. Hanks turned to Protect Our Defenders for support.

In a letter sent Monday to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, organization President Nancy Parrish said the reversal of Wilkerson’s conviction was based on “failed and biased reasoning.” She issued a point-by-point rebuttal to Franklin’s rationale and called for the commander’s dismissal.

Parrish noted that a jury of five officers reached a guilty verdict as a result of court-martial proceedings, yet Franklin — who did not attend — threw out their decision based on his reading of records.

“In every case, the facts in evidence and the weight of the credible trial testimony directly contradict the statement Franklin makes to support the conclusion he reached,” she wrote. “His pathetic excuses and sophomoric logic leave no doubt that he did nothing more than protect a fellow pilot. ... He has destroyed the facade that commanders can be trusted to do what is right.”

No response was immediately available from Hagel. The Defense secretary already has proposed changing military codes to eliminate the power of commanders to overturn court-martial verdicts for serious crimes.

Congress also appears to be moving toward reform. Last week, with 83 Republican and Democrat co-sponsors, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., reintroduced a measure known as the STOP Act, which would establish special prosecutors to replace chain-of-command control over sexual-assault cases in the military.

Capt. Justin Brockhoff, a public-affairs officer at the base, confirmed that Wilkerson has reported for duty and will serve as safety officer for the 12th Air Force (Air Forces Southern). “He’ll be treated like any other airman joining our staff,” Brockhoff said.

Dr. Stephen Hanks, a Tucson physician, said military officials did not tell his sister that Wilkerson was being sent there.

What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Letter: What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Posted: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:16 pm

Letter to the Editor

Every time I am stopped by the police I tell them I am taking the Fifth and refusing to answer their questions.

I even refuse to tell them my name.

I am not a criminal, but I figure that since the founders died to get me those rights I should use them or lose them.

The next things that usually happens is the cops tell me I don’t have any Fifth Amendment rights in “this case.” I am confused on that because Miranda v Arizona says “If the individual indicates ... he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease”

And of course things then get worse. The cops usually illegally search my wallet, and all my pockets looking for my ID, drugs and guns. I don’t carry an ID, and I don’t use drugs or carry a gun so they never find anything.

Yes, I know Terry v. Ohio allows the cops to give you a pat down search of your outer garments looking for weapons, but a search of my pockets and wallet is clearly illegal per the 4th Amendment and Terry v. Ohio.

Then, I am usually handcuffed and falsely arrested while the police make all kinds of threats on what is going to happen if I don’t answer their questions. After an hour or two the cops release me and tell me I am a jerk for thinking I have “Constitutional rights”.

With that in mind, I can understand where the cops are going in attempting to force Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, to answer their questions without reading him his Miranda rights.

Our Constitutional rights were not created to protect criminals. They were created to protect the innocent from government tyrants, like the police that have a number of times falsely arrested me, illegally questioned me and illegally searched me. I guess I should be glad, because I have not been beaten up, yet, for thinking I have Constitutional rights.

Mike Ross

Tempe

Bush’s legacy keeps getting worse

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Bush’s legacy keeps getting worse

By Eugene Robinson, Published: April 25

In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse.

I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man — now that he’s no longer in the White House.

But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. [Reminds me of David Dorn. David Dorn is the guy who is accusing me of being a government snitch for the last 12 years.] Begin with the indelible stain that one of his worst decisions left on our country’s honor: torture.

Hiding behind the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Bush made torture official U.S. policy. Just about every objective observer has agreed with this stark conclusion. The most recent assessment came this month in a 576-page report from a task force of the bipartisan Constitution Project, which stated that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

We knew about the torture before Bush left office — at least, we knew about the waterboarding of three “high-value” detainees involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. But the Constitution Project task force — which included such figures as Asa Hutchinson, who served in high-ranking posts in the Bush administration, and William Sessions, who was FBI director under three presidents — concluded that other forms of torture were used “in many instances” in a manner that was “directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”

Bush administration apologists argue that even waterboarding does not necessarily constitute torture and that other coercive — and excruciatingly painful — interrogation methods, such as putting subjects in “stress positions” or exposing them to extreme temperatures, certainly do not. The task force strongly disagreed, citing U.S. laws and court rulings, international treaties and common decency.

The Senate intelligence committee has produced, but refuses to make public, a 6,000-page report on the CIA’s use of torture and the network of clandestine “black site” prisons the agency established under Bush. One of President Obama’s worst decisions upon taking office in 2009, in my view, was to decline to convene some kind of blue-ribbon “truth commission” to bring all the abuses to light.

It may be years before all the facts are known. But the decision to commit torture looks ever more shameful with the passage of time.

Bush’s decision to invade and conquer Iraq also looks, in hindsight, like an even bigger strategic error. Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction still have yet to be found; nearly 5,000 Americans and untold Iraqis sacrificed their lives to eliminate a threat that did not exist.

We knew this, of course, when Obama became president. It’s one of the main reasons he was elected. We knew, too, that Bush’s decision to turn to Iraq diverted focus and resources from Afghanistan. But I don’t think anyone fully grasped that giving the Taliban a long, healing respite would eventually make Afghanistan this country’s longest or second-longest war, depending on what date you choose as the beginning of hostilities in Vietnam.

And it’s clear that the Bush administration did not foresee how the Iraq experience would constrain future presidents in their use of military force. Syria is a good example. Like Saddam, Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless dictator who does not hesitate to massacre his own people. But unlike Saddam, Assad does have weapons of mass destruction. And unlike Saddam, Assad has alliances with the terrorist group Hezbollah and the nuclear-mad mullahs in Iran.

I do not advocate U.S. intervention in Syria, because I fear we might make things worse rather than better. But I wonder how I might feel — and what options Obama might have — if we had not squandered so much blood and treasure in Iraq.

Bush didn’t pay for his wars. The bills he racked up for military adventures, prescription-drug benefits, the bank bailout and other impulse purchases helped create the fiscal and financial crises he bequeathed to Obama. His profligacy also robbed the Republican Party establishment of small-government credibility, thus helping give birth to the tea party movement. Thanks a lot for that.

As I’ve written before, Bush did an enormous amount of good by making it possible for AIDS sufferers in Africa to receive antiretroviral drug therapy. This literally saved millions of lives and should weigh heavily on one side of the scale when we assess The Decider’s presidency. But the pile on the other side just keeps getting bigger.

New film looks at ‘War on Whistleblowers’

Sadly Emperor Obama is just a Democratic version of George W. Bush!!!

By Joe Davidson, Published: April 23

The Obama administration’s approach to federal whistleblowers has been likened to “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

On the good doctor’s side, President Obama has important accomplishments in protecting the rights of whistleblowers. Yet whistleblower advocates are fuming at the administration’s actions against federal employees whom it considers to be leakers of national security information.

“There’s a schizophrenia within the administration,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project. “It’s been Obama versus Obama on whistleblower policy. Until recently, there was a virtual free-speech advocacy for whistleblower job rights that’s unprecedented, more than any other president in history.

“At the same time,” Devine added, “he has willingly allowed the Justice Department to prosecute whistleblowers on tenuous grounds.”

That last point — the Mr. Hyde side — is the focus of the new film “War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State.” (Disclosure: The documentary features comments by Dana Priest, a Washington Post colleague.) It is a project of the Brave New Foundation, a social justice advocacy organization. The film is being shown in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles, but the main distribution channels will be iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and cable systems.

The Justice Department rejects the notion that it is overzealous in its prosecution of those the government calls national security leakers.

“Unauthorized disclosures of classified information cause damage to our national security and we take the investigation and prosecution of such matters very seriously,” Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said via e-mail. “In these and all other cases, Justice Department investigators and prosecutors follow the facts and the law to determine whether charges are appropriate.”

The Justice Department does not target whistleblowers, he added: “However, we cannot condone the knowing and willful disclosure of classified information to the media or others not entitled to such information. An individual in authorized possession of classified information has no authority or right to unilaterally determine that it should be made public or otherwise disclose it.”

The film recognizes the president’s good side, with a quick nod by Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. The “good news,” she said, is passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which Obama supported, and his directive providing protection for national security whistleblowers. That mention, however, is not until 59 minutes into the 66-minute film.

Balanced? No. But the stories about the government’s aggressive moves against federal employees who worked to uphold the finest traditions of public service are chilling and deserve the notice and outrage the film hopes to generate.

Franz Gayl’s is the first case presented. The Defense Department civilian employee was punished for his efforts to save the lives of U.S. troops at war.

“Hundreds of Marines were tragically lost and probably thousands maimed unnecessarily, so I said, let’s replace the Humvees with what are called MRAPs, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles,” he says in the film.

After taking his concerns to Pentagon officials with no luck, he went to the news media. Then the blowback hit. He was stripped of his security clearance, the lifeline for national security workers, and suspended.

“They were using all these personnel actions against me,” he said. “I’m the substandard employee, bottom 3 percent, unreliable, untrustworthy, et cetera, et cetera. After investigations and after all these personnel actions and reprisals, I was placed on administrative leave.

“I was fearful. If I have to leave the government now and I don’t have security clearances, we’re gonna have to move away. I can’t get a job around here. You can’t do anything without a security clearance around [the] D.C. area. I knew that life was gonna go ‘foof,’ fall off a cliff.”

Gayl was fortunate to have whistleblower advocates who cushioned his fall. And in November 2011, after intervention by an Office of Special Counsel that was re-energized by Obama, the military’s threat to suspend Gayl indefinitely was lifted and his security clearance was reinstated.

There’s a lot left out of his story in this space, and similar stories of other whistleblowers can’t be mentioned at all. Gayl’s is a distressing tale of Uncle Sam playing the bully, making life hell for a federal employee who fought to better protect American troops.

“I’m now working back at the Pentagon in the office from which I was removed,” Gayl says at the end of the film. “I feel very lucky, because I received a lot of support from a lot of outsiders that I don’t think every person in my situation gets.”

The film makes you wonder how many more trampled, and largely unknown, federal whistleblowers like Gayl are out there.

Twitter: @JoeDavidsonWP

Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.

US tries new aerial tools in Caribbean drug fight

And of course the drug war is also a jobs program for the civilians who are involved in making all the high tech devices in the article that are used to spy on and track the drug smugglers.

I am sure that the engineers, managers, and salesmen that are involved on the civilian side are also paid very well.

Of course as we know from the Mexican side of the drug war all this stuff will eventually fail. When they build a 8 foot high fence on the border, the Mexicans show up with a 9 foot ladder.

Then we build a 10 foot high fence, and the Mexicans show up with an 11 foot ladder. And the cycle repeats it's self indefinitely.

Source

US tries new aerial tools in Caribbean drug fight

By BEN FOX | Associated Press

ABOARD THE HIGH SPEED VESSEL SWIFT (AP) — Drug smugglers who race across the Caribbean in speedboats will typically jettison their cargo when spotted by surveillance aircraft, hoping any chance of prosecuting them will vanish with the drugs sinking to the bottom of the sea.

That may be a less winning tactic in the future. The U.S. Navy on Friday began testing two new aerial tools, borrowed from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, that officials say will make it easier to detect, track and videotape drug smugglers in action.

One of the devices on display aboard the High Speed Vessel Swift is a large, white balloon-like craft known as an aerostat, which is tethered up to 2,000 feet (600 meters) above the ship's stern. The other tool on board for tests in the Florida Straits is a type of drone that can be launched by hand from the deck.

Together, they expand the ability of Navy and Coast Guard personnel to see what's beyond their horizon, according to officials from both military branches and the contractors hoping to sell the devices to the U.S. government.

The devices should allow authorities to detect and monitor suspected drug shipments from afar for longer sustained periods, giving them a better chance of stopping the smugglers. They also should allow them to make continuous videotapes that can be used in prosecutions.

"Being able to see them and watch what they are doing even before we get there is going to give us an edge," said Chief Chris Sinclair, assistant officer in charge of a law enforcement detachment on board the Swift, a private vessel leased to the Navy that is about to begin a monthlong deployment to the southwestern Caribbean, tracking the busy smuggling routes off Colombia and Honduras.

Crews practiced launching and operating both systems before a small contingent of news media on board the Swift, managing to bring back video of vessels participating in a mock surveillance mission as well as radar and video images of the fishing charters and sailboats that dot the choppy seas separating Cuba from the U.S. mainland.

The drone, officially a Puma All Environment unmanned aircraft system from Aerovironment Inc. of Simi Valley, California, splashed into the water on one landing and had to be retrieved. On the second round, it clacked noisily but intact on the shifting deck of the 321-foot ship. Rear Adm. Sinclair Harris, commander of the Navy's 4th Fleet, said the devices are necessary at a time when the service is making a transition to smaller, faster ships amid budget cuts.

The aerostat, formally the Aerostar TIF-25K and made by a division of Raven Industries Inc. of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is filled with helium. It's an old technology, models of which have been used for decades, but it's packed with cameras and sensors that expand the ship's radar capability from about 5 miles (8 kilometers) to about 50 miles. That can help teams in an on-board control center to identify larger ships, which now would appear as just dots on the horizon, from as far as 15 miles (25 kilometers) away.

The Puma, meanwhile, can be sent out to inspect a vessel flagged by the larger aerostat and give a "God's eye view," of what's happening on board, a job usually handled by a plane or helicopter, said Craig Benson, director of business development for the company.

Both the aerostat and the drone have been used widely by the U.S. government for overseas actions, but Harris and others aboard the Swift said neither has been used before by the Navy to conduct counter-drug operations.

Unmanned aerial devices, however, are not new to the drug fight. U.S. Customs and Border Protection operates 10 Predator drones, including two based in Cape Canaveral, Florida, that patrol a wide swathe of the Caribbean through the Bahamas and down to south of Puerto Rico. It deployed one to the Dominican Republic last year for six weeks and has considered using one in Honduras. The others are used along the northern and southern borders of the United States.

The U.S. military has long been deeply involved in counter-drug operations in the Southern Hemisphere, coordinated by a multi-agency task force based in Key West, Florida. Navy ships and Air Force jets use their radar to track and run down smugglers, though for legal reasons the actual arrests are carried out by the Coast Guard, civilian agencies or officials from other countries.

In March, the military said it would reduce patrols and sorties in Latin America and the Caribbean because of the automatic spending cuts imposed by Congress, another argument for increased use of aerial surveillance devices like the aerostat and drone, officials said.

Representatives on the Swift from both contractors declined to say what their systems cost. But they said each can be run at a fraction of the cost of the fixed-wing planes or helicopters usually dispatched to check out suspected smugglers.

US uses drug war to turn Mexico into a police state???

U.S. role at a crossroads in Mexico’s intelligence war on the cartels

By Dana Priest, Published: April 27

MEXICO CITY — For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have put aside their tension-filled history on security matters to forge an unparalleled alliance against Mexico’s drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning.

But now, much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy.

Drugs and homicides in Mexico.

The December inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto brought the nationalistic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back to power after 13 years, and with it a whiff of resentment over the deep U.S. involvement in Mexico’s fight against narco-traffickers.

The new administration has shifted priorities away from the U.S.-backed strategy of arresting kingpins, which sparked an unprecedented level of violence among the cartels, and toward an emphasis on prevention and keeping Mexico’s streets safe and calm, Mexican authorities said.

Some U.S. officials fear the coming of an unofficial truce with cartel leaders. The Mexicans see it otherwise. “The objective of fighting organized crime is not in conflict with achieving peace,” said Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States.

Interviews with more than four dozen current and former U.S. and Mexican diplomats, law enforcement agents, military officers and intelligence officials — most of whom agreed to speak about sensitive matters only on condition of anonymity — paint the most detailed public portrait to date of how the two countries grew so close after so many years of distance and distrust, and what is at stake should the alliance be scaled back.

U.S. officials got their first inkling that the relationship might change just two weeks after Peña Nieto assumed office Dec. 1. At the U.S. ambassador’s request, the new president sent his top five security officials to an unusual meeting at the U.S. Embassy here. In a crowded conference room, the new attorney general and interior minister sat in silence, not knowing what to expect, next to the new leaders of the army, navy and Mexican intelligence agency.

In front of them at the Dec. 15 meeting were representatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the CIA, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other U.S. agencies tasked with helping Mexico destroy the drug cartels that had besieged the country for the past decade.

The Mexicans remained stone-faced as they learned for the first time just how entwined the two countries had become during the battle against narco-traffickers, and how, in the process, the United States had been given near-complete entree to Mexico’s territory and the secrets of its citizens, according to several U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.

The administration of former president Felipe Calderon had granted high-flying U.S. spy planes access to Mexican airspace for the purpose of gathering intelligence. Unarmed Customs and Border Protection drones had flown from bases in the United States in support of Mexican military and federal police raids against drug targets and to track movements that would establish suspects’ “patterns of life.” The United States had also provided electronic signals technology, ground sensors, voice-recognition gear, cellphone-tracking devices, data analysis tools, computer hacking kits and airborne cameras that could read license plates from three miles away.

Under a classified program code-named SCENIC, the CIA was training Mexicans in how to target and vet potential assets for recruitment and how to guard against infiltration by narco-traffickers.

In deference to their visitors, the U.S. briefers left out the fact that most of the 25 kingpin taken off the streets in the past five years had been removed because of U.S.-supplied information, often including the location of top cartel members in real time, according to people familiar with the meeting. The CIA and Calderon declined to comment for this article.

Also unremarked upon was the mounting criticism that success against the cartels’ leadership had helped incite more violence than anyone had predicted, more than 60,000 deaths and 25,000 disappearances in the past seven years alone.

Meanwhile, the drug flow into the United States continued unabated. Mexico remains the U.S. market’s largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine.

No one had come up with a quick, realistic alternative to Calderon’s novel use of the Mexican military with U.S. support. But stopping the cartel violence had become Peña Nieto’s top priority during the campaign. The U.S. administration didn’t know what that meant. Some feared a scaling back of the bilateral efforts and a willingness to trade the relentless drive against cartel leaders for calmer streets.

When the Dec. 15 meeting concluded, Mexico’s new security officials remained poker-faced, “They said they were very appreciative to have received so much information,” said one U.S. official familiar with the meeting. We will be in touch, they added, and left.

The roots of cooperation

U.S. involvement in Mexico’s deteriorating internal security first peaked in the mid-1980s when the cocaine epidemic in the United States turned the southern neighbor into a prosperous distribution route north. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a National Security Decision Directive instructing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to help defeat the growing narco-trafficking menace worldwide.

Beginning in the late 1980s, a massive U.S. air, sea and land effort was shutting down many Caribbean drug routes. The traffickers were increasingly forced to move their product through the only territory left unhindered: Mexico.

Mexico’s secret security ties with the United States date at least to the Cold War, when Mexico City was a hub of intrigue, the “Beirut of the Western Hemisphere,” according to intelligence history scholar Sergio Aguayo. To keep an eye on the United States, the Soviet Union and China had their largest embassies here, necessitating a large CIA presence.

Back then, the Mexican intelligence service, CISEN, “was basically run by the CIA,” according to one former CISEN official. Although that has changed with time, the unusually close relationship between Mexican presidents and CIA chiefs has not. Then-CIA director David H. Petraeus attended a party at the Mexican Embassy in Washington in 2011 and visited Calderon in Mexico last year. As many of his predecessors had done, Calderon usually met with the CIA director when he came to Washington.

The CIA’s importance here can be explained, in part, by the historically strained dealings between Mexico and the DEA and U.S. military. “There was a void that the CIA stepped into,” said Jeffrey S. Davidow, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and author of a book about the prickly relationship between the two countries.

In the mid-1980s, the DEA had been virtually banished from the country because of its aggressive pursuit of a slain DEA agent’s killers. But that relationship has improved greatly in the past five years. Now, the DEA has more employees in Mexico than in any other of its 67 foreign posts.

In 2000, a political earthquake in Mexico paved the way for a less suspicious era between the two neighbors. The 71-year political reign of the authoritarian and corrupt PRI ended with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party as president. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States turned the new openness into unprecedented bilateral action against terrorism.

The two countries fortified the border with personnel and surveillance technology. Eventually, a protocol was worked out for Mexico to stop, detain and interrogate non-Mexicans traveling north toward the United States. Mexican authorities allow U.S. officials to remotely question third-country nationals of concern to the United States, according to Mexican and U.S. officials.

Clamping down on illegal border crossings, however, had an unintended consequence: It upset agreements among the cartels over smuggling routes, sparking yet more violent competition.

By the time Calderon was inaugurated in late 2006, many experts believed that Mexico was losing control of parts of the country. Even before his inauguration, Calderon pleaded with President George W. Bush to help the Mexican military quash the cartels, according to Antonio Garza, then U.S. ambassador to Mexico, who attended a meeting between the presidents.

Bush agreed to help, and the Merida Initiative, a $1.9 billion aid package for military training and equipment and judicial reform, set the framework for a new level of U.S.-Mexican cooperation. In a little-noticed move, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took a leading role in the U.S. effort to defeat the cartels, signaling the importance of intelligence in combating organized crime.

By then, cartels had begun employing assassination squads, according to Guillermo Valdes, who was CISEN director at the time. CISEN discovered from a captured videotape and a special analytical group it set up that some of the cartels had hired former members of the U.S.-trained Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, to create sociopathic killers who could behead a man, torture a child or immerse a captive in a vat of acid.

Anxious to counterattack, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins, but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the White House, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system.

As the Mexican death toll mounted, Calderon pleaded with Bush for armed drones. He had been impressed by the results in Iraq and Afghanistan, two former U.S. officials said. The White House considered the request, but quickly rejected it. It was far too likely to result in collateral damage, they said.

Violence deepened ties

By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace throughout Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanged from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers. Ciudad Juarez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone.

Obama approved an intensification of bilateral measures. Deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan, also in charge of counterterrorism operations focused on al-Qaeda, led the U.S. side. His Mexican partner was CISEN director Valdes.

“We got people together to define the operations,” Valdes said in an interview here. Every new program was vetted by Mexico’s security team and often by Calderon. The day-to-day operations were conceived in Mexico and approved by the U.S. ambassador at the time, Carlos Pascual, and the specific Mexican agency head involved.

The first important decision was to use the same “high-value target” strategy that had been so successful against al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. authorities used real-time intelligence against kingpins on a Mexican-U.S. priority list — including cellphone geolocation, wiretaps, electronic intercepts and tracking of digital records — to help Mexican authorities target them.

The second was to clean up the Mexican units that would be responsible for carrying out raids.

As early as 1997, the DEA had funded the creation of Sensitive Investigative Units (SIU) made up of foreign nationals, first in Colombia, then in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, and eventually in nine other countries. By mid-2006, the DEA had two units with a total of 184 members in Mexico alone, according to a DEA inspector general’s report. The Mexicans were brought for training to the DEA’s facility at Quantico.

Mexico does not allow U.S. agents to take part in the actual raids, but they can be involved in planning operations and can even direct them remotely.

The CIA also has trained units in raid tactics, protection of senior officials, intelligence collecting and, in a departure for the spy agency, in gathering and preserving evidence that can be used in court.

To guard against penetration from the cartels, members were polygraphed, drug-tested and vetted for criminal and financial irregularities. But operations were still routinely exposed by moles inserted by the cartels. So, beginning in 2009, the size of the units was cut significantly. Those who remained worked under cover and lived in secret safe houses. The U.S. agencies they worked with provided special cellphones and even paid their salaries and set up their bank accounts. There are now six or seven SIUs in Mexico, sponsored by the DEA, CIA and at least one other U.S. law enforcement agency.

The two countries also have constructed an elaborate physical infrastructure and developed protocols for sharing sensitive, often real-time intelligence. Garza, the former U.S. ambassador, called it “the plumbing” of the security relationship.

“We started to appreciate that the same sort of plumbing construction for counterterrorism naturally translated into other security cooperation,” he said.

By 2011, the plumbing extended to a CIA-run fusion center in Mexico City, a DEA-sponsored fusion center in Monterrey, a federal police bunker of “Star Wars”-like screens and computer terminals, also in the capital city, as well as separate military and federal police intelligence centers and one inside the headquarters of CISEN.

“They gave us intelligence, they helped teach us the 24-hour intelligence cycle, helped build up our intelligence centers and taught us the importance of connecting intelligence to operations,” said Valdes, the CISEN director until September 2011. “Both DEA and the [CIA] helped, and we had a high level of support from Washington.”

Drugs and homicides in Mexico.

The infrastructure also has included regional law enforcement headquarters with temporary war rooms set up during large-scale Mexican military and federal police operations in Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Acapulco.

To support Mexican operations in Ciudad Juarez, U.S. authorities arranged two brainstorming sessions at nearby Fort Bliss in Texas for their Mexican counterparts. Experts were brought in, including, upon Mexican request, the police chief of New Orleans, from whom they wanted to learn about the civilian large-scale control and relief measures after Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. liaison officers remained on hand inside the federal police war room in Ciudad Juarez for more than two years, according to U.S. and former Mexican officials involved.

The bulk of the U.S. work finding cartel members depends on the DEA’s exhaustive network of informants and undercover agents. Their information usually trumps what Mexican authorities bring to the table, particularly because local and state police remain riddled with corruption.

DEA-provided information led to the killing of cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva in December 2009. The cartel not only moved significant quantities of cocaine into the United States but also had penetrated the highest level of Mexico’s institutions. His death gave Calderon his first significant victory in the militarized anti-cartel campaign.

But planning for the Beltran Leyva operation had to overcome significant hitches. The CIA persuaded the embassy team to give the mission to a specialized Mexican army unit it was working with at the time. But the army chain of command dragged its feet. After several weeks of delay, the DEA insisted the mission be given to Mexico’s more aggressive Naval Special Forces.

In another successful mission, the DEA in the summer of 2010 was able to locate the multiple cellphones of U.S.-born kingpin Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as “La Barbie” for his Ken-doll good looks. The drug agency tracked his travels over time, allowing Mexican authorities to pursue him through five Mexican states. He was captured in August 2010 and is in Mexican custody, still awaiting extradition to the United States.

Drones became part of the mix, too.

In July 2009, hours after Mexican smugglers shot and killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent while trying to steal his night-vision goggles, U.S. authorities were given permission to fly an unarmed Predator drone into Mexican airspace to hunt for suspects. Intelligence from the flights was passed to the Mexican army. Within 12 hours, the army brought back more information, according to two U.S. officials involved in the operation. Eventually, four suspects were captured. Three pleaded guilty, one is awaiting trial and a fifth remains at large.

That first flight dispelled Mexican fears that U.S. authorities would try to take control of drone operations. An agreement was reached that would temporarily give operational control to Mexican authorities during such flights. U.S. pilots sitting in the States would control the planes remotely, but a Mexican military or federal police commander would be able to direct the pilot within the boundaries of a Mexico-designated grid.

By late 2010, drones were flying deeper into Mexico to spy on the cartels, as they did during the two-day gun battle involving 800 federal police that resulted in the death of Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, head of the ultra-violent La Familia Michoacana cartel.

By then, Mexican authorities had grown so enamored with drones that they were requesting more flights than the United States could deliver, given that most of the aircraft were being used to support operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan. So Mexican authorities bought their own drones. The first public indication of this development came when one crashed in El Paso in December 2010.

“Eventually, when they got better at using their own, they would fly more missions than we would,” said one former law enforcement official involved in drone operations.

Mexico’s new approach

Four months and many conversations after the Dec. 15 meeting, the new Mexican government is still fleshing out the details of its counterdrug approach.

In a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Mexico’s top security team shared the broad outlines of the plan with U.S. agencies, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. It contains many changes.

The president will not be nearly as directly involved in counterdrug efforts as Calderon was, the officials said. The interior minister will coordinate the relationships between various Mexican and U.S. agencies and other Mexican units. The director of the Mexican intelligence agency will decide which Mexican agency should receive and act on sensitive U.S. information.

Given the corruption of Mexican law enforcement and armed forces, U.S. officials said privately they would be unwilling to share sensitive information until they have vetted the people involved and understand how their information is to be protected.

The Mexican government also plans to create five regional intelligence fusion centers, staffed with federal and state officials, and to build a 10,000-member super police force. This force would be steeped in military discipline but would use police tactics, rather than overwhelming military force, to keep violence to a minimum.

Medina Mora, the Mexican ambassador, said in an interview that his nation considers U.S. help in the drug war “a centerpiece” of Mexico’s counternarcotics strategy. But the Mexican delegation in Washington also informed U.S. authorities that Americans will no longer be allowed to work inside any fusion center, including the one in Monterrey. The DEA agents and retired military contractors there will have to go.

Several senior U.S. officials say U.S. agencies stand ready to help in any way the new administration allows.

They anxiously await further details.

Julie Tate in Washington and Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan

Source

With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Published: April 28, 2013 194 Comments

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.

American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity.

It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.

Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.

But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.

Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.

The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.

“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.

The C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011.

A number of senior officials on the Afghan National Security Council are also individually on the agency’s payroll, Afghan officials said.

While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to curry favor is a more unusual arrangement.

Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Mr. Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.

By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.

Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.

The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said.

Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.

Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.

Mr. Dostum, who declined requests for comment, had previously said he was given $80,000 a month to serve as Mr. Karzai’s emissary in northern Afghanistan. “I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build my dream house,” he was quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with Time magazine.

Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it, Afghan and Western officials said, though they would not identify any by name.

That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations. “They’ll work with criminals if they think they have to,” one American former official said.

Interestingly, the cash from Tehran appears to have been handled with greater transparency than the dollars from the C.I.A., Afghan officials said. The Iranian payments were routed through Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff. Some of the money was deposited in an account in the president’s name at a state-run bank, and some was kept at the palace. The sum delivered would then be announced at the next cabinet meeting. The Iranians gave $3 million to well over $10 million a year, Afghan officials said.

When word of the Iranian cash leaked out in October 2010, Mr. Karzai told reporters that he was grateful for it. He then added: “The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices.”

At the time, Mr. Karzai’s aides said he was referring to the billions in formal aid the United States gives. But the former adviser said in a recent interview that the president was in fact referring to the C.I.A.’s bags of cash.

No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by a small clique at the National Security Council, including its administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said.

Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade. Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push, American officials said.

After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began telling colleagues, “an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A.”

Army says no to more tanks, but Congress insists

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Army says no to more tanks, but Congress insists

By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press

Updated 12:05 am, Monday, April 29, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — Built to dominate the enemy in combat, the Army's hulking Abrams tank is proving equally hard to beat in a budget battle.

Lawmakers from both parties have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams.

But senior Army officials have said repeatedly, "No thanks."

It's the inverse of the federal budget world these days, in which automatic spending cuts are leaving sought-after pet programs struggling or unpaid altogether. Republicans and Democrats for years have fought so bitterly that lawmaking in Washington ground to a near-halt.

Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.

"If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way," Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, told The Associated Press this past week.

Why are the tank dollars still flowing? Politics.

Keeping the Abrams production line rolling protects businesses and good paying jobs in congressional districts where the tank's many suppliers are located.

If there's a home of the Abrams, it's politically important Ohio. The nation's only tank plant is in Lima. So it's no coincidence that the champions for more tanks are Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, two of Capitol's Hill most prominent deficit hawks, as well as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. They said their support is rooted in protecting national security, not in pork-barrel politics.

"The one area where we are supposed to spend taxpayer money is in defense of the country," said Jordan, whose district in the northwest part of the state includes the tank plant.

The Abrams dilemma underscores the challenge that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel faces as he seeks to purge programs that the military considers unnecessary or too expensive in order to ensure there's enough money for essential operations, training and equipment.

Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, faces a daunting task in persuading members of Congress to eliminate or scale back projects favored by constituents.

Federal budgets are always peppered with money for pet projects. What sets the Abrams example apart is the certainty of the Army's position.

Sean Kennedy, director of research for the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste, said Congress should listen when one of the military services says no to more equipment.

"When an institution as risk averse as the Defense Department says they have enough tanks, we can probably believe them," Kennedy said.

Congressional backers of the Abrams upgrades view the vast network of companies, many of them small businesses, that manufacture the tanks' materials and parts as a critical asset that has to be preserved. The money, they say, is a modest investment that will keep important tooling and manufacturing skills from being lost if the Abrams line were to be shut down.

The Lima plant is a study in how federal dollars affect local communities, which in turn hold tight to the federal dollars. The facility is owned by the federal government but operated by the land systems division of General Dynamics, a major defense contractor that spent close to $11 million last year on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The plant is Lima's fifth-largest employer with close to 700 employees, down from about 1,100 just a few years ago, according to Mayor David Berger. But the facility is still crucial to the local economy. "All of those jobs and their spending activity in the community and the company's spending probably have about a $100 million impact annually," Berger said.

U.S. role in Mexico drug war will be a topic of Obama visit

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Mexico captures drug kingpin's father-in-law The major arrest comes on the eve of President Obama's visit, and as Mexico is starting to pull away from the U.S. on security matters.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

April 30, 2013, 9:10 p.m.

MEXICO CITY — On the eve of President Obama's trip to Mexico, Mexican authorities on Tuesday announced the capture of a key drug cartel operative, the father-in-law and associate of one of the world's most-wanted fugitive kingpins.

The major arrest — the first under new President Enrique Peña Nieto — comes as the extraordinarily close U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the drug war is undergoing significant changes.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that officials of the 5-month-old Mexican administration were alarmed to discover how deeply involved U.S. advisors were in sensitive areas of security and law enforcement during the six-year government of former President Felipe Calderon.

As a consequence, the new government plans to narrow American participation in its agencies and activities, confining U.S. contacts to more limited channels. The development is unnerving U.S. officials, who have overseen a program of nearly $2 billion in support to Mexico's drug war, including the training of police and judicial institutions.

Asked Tuesday about these shifts, Obama said in Washington that he would wait to "judge how this will alter the relationship" until he speaks directly with Peña Nieto on Thursday "to see exactly what are they trying to accomplish."

But a Mexican official told The Times that Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong had informed his counterpart, Janet Napolitano, of the new restrictions in April. Osorio, in Washington for a series of meetings, told the American officials that future contact would be solely through his office, the source said.

"It was like deer in headlights" when Peña Nieto's officials began to examine the way Mexican government security agencies were working and discovered an American advisor at every turn, a U.S. official said.

Some of the changes under Peña Nieto reflect how his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, prefers to do things, with all power concentrated in a few hands at the top. But it also reflects irritation within the new Mexican government over how badly the attorney general's office and the Interior Ministry, under U.S. tutelage during the Calderon years, botched a string of high-profile drug prosecutions, the vetting of new police forces and other projects.

Plus Peña Nieto, whose party has long used the issue of sovereignty as a rallying cry, gets points in some quarters for appearing to stand up to — and cut down — the Americans.

Yet the sharing of U.S. intelligence that flourished under Calderon was a crucial element in precisely the kind of high profile arrest that was announced Tuesday.

Ines Coronel Barrera, 45, was captured early Tuesday in the border state of Sonora by federal police, who also confiscated marijuana destined for Arizona, weapons, vehicles and four presumed bodyguards, the Interior Ministry announced.

Coronel is the father of Emma Coronel, who married Mexico's most powerful drug baron, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, nearly six years ago when she was an 18-year-old beauty queen. Guzman's third wife, Emma Coronel gave birth to twin girls in the Los Angeles area in August 2011.

Coronel is also considered by authorities to be a key player in fugitive billionaire Guzman's vast empire, and in January he was added to the U.S. Treasury Department's so-called kingpin black list, which called him a major marijuana trafficker and banned U.S. companies, banks and individuals from doing business with him.

The Coronel arrest was a reminder of the areas in which the U.S. and Mexicans have worked most closely and efficiently, succeeding in weakening some cartels, although others grew and proliferated.

Eduardo Sanchez, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry who announced Tuesday's capture, was asked repeatedly what role U.S. intelligence had in the takedown of Coronel. He cited a list of Mexican government agencies that worked "in close coordination with each other" to begin the process of bringing Coronel to justice and "contribute to a Mexico in peace."

The drug war under Calderon unleashed waves of violence across the country that claimed more than 70,000 lives and led to the disappearance of thousands of people. Peña Nieto, whose party ruled with an autocratic air for seven decades until losing the election in 2000, promised a weary Mexican society to reduce violence in his successful bid last year to return the PRI to presidential power.

Narrowing the American role also fits into his strategy of emphasizing other issues, like the economy and trade, to deflect attention from organized crime, even though the power of the cartels and the killing continue in much of the nation.

wilkinson@latimes.com

More on the US/Mexico drug war!!!!

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Mexico’s Curbs on U.S. Role in Drug Fight Spark Friction

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD, DAMIEN CAVE and GINGER THOMPSON

Published: April 30, 2013 160 Comments

MEXICO CITY — In their joint fight against drug traffickers, the United States and Mexico have forged an unusually close relationship in recent years, with the Americans regularly conducting polygraph tests on elite Mexican security officials to root out anyone who had been corrupted.

But shortly after Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office in December, American agents got a clear message that the dynamics, with Washington holding the clear upper hand, were about to change.

“So do we get to polygraph you?” one incoming Mexican official asked his American counterparts, alarming United States security officials who consider the vetting of the Mexicans central to tracking down drug kingpins. The Mexican government briefly stopped its vetted officials from cooperating in sensitive investigations. The Americans are waiting to see if Mexico allows polygraphs when assigning new members to units, a senior Obama administration official said.

In another clash, American security officials were recently asked to leave an important intelligence center in Monterrey, where they had worked side by side with an array of Mexican military and police commanders collecting and analyzing tips and intelligence on drug gangs. The Mexicans, scoffing at the notion of Americans’ having so much contact with different agencies, questioned the value of the center and made clear that they would put tighter reins on the sharing of drug intelligence.

There have long been political sensitivities in Mexico over allowing too much American involvement. But the recent policy changes have rattled American officials used to far fewer restrictions than they have faced in years.

Asked about security cooperation with Mexico at a news conference on Tuesday, President Obama said: “We’ve made great strides in the coordination and cooperation between our two governments over the last several years. But my suspicion is, is that things can be improved.”

Mr. Obama suggested that many of Mexico’s changes “had to do with refinements and improvements in terms of how Mexican authorities work with each other, how they coordinate more effectively, and it has less to do with how they’re dealing with us, per se.” He added, “So I’m not going to yet judge how this will alter the relationship between the United States and Mexico until I’ve heard directly from them to see what exactly are they trying to accomplish.”

Mr. Obama is scheduled to visit Mexico on Thursday and Friday on a mission publicly intended to broaden economic ties.

But behind the scenes, the Americans are coming to grips with a scaling back of the level of coordination that existed during the presidency of Felipe Calderón, which included American drones flying deep into Mexican territory and American spy technology helping to track high-level suspects.

In an interview, Mexico’s interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, made no apologies. He defended the moves, including the creation of a “one-stop window” in his department to screen and handle all intelligence, in the name of efficiency and “a new phase” in fighting crime.

In a country worn down by tens of thousands of people killed in a drug war, he said Mexico needed to emphasize smart intelligence over the militarized “combating violence with more violence” approach of the Calderón years.

But American officials here see the changes as a way to minimize American involvement and manage the image of the violence, rather than confronting it with clear strategies.

The lack of certainty over Mexico’s plans and commitment has jeopardized new security assistance from the United States. Plans to release $246 million, the latest installment of a $1.9 billion anticrime package known as the Merida initiative, have been held up by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. His office has been waiting for months for more details from the State Department and the Mexican government on how the money would be spent and what it might accomplish.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide a more candid assessment, said a recent visit by Mr. Osorio Chong to Washington helped calm some fears. A delegation of Mexican officials is also expected to visit in the coming weeks to explain the country’s plans to members of Congress.

But there is growing anxiety that the violence has not diminished, with daily killings hovering around 50 since last fall. Some American officials say they are increasingly worried by public and private signs suggesting that Mr. Peña Nieto, the young face of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico for 71 years, is putting the government’s crime-fighting image above its actions.

“The cosmetics — that’s what they care about,” one American official said, insisting on anonymity so as not to worsen already tense relations.

“The impression they seem to want to send is ‘We got this,’ ” one former American official said, asking for anonymity because he was discussing private conversations. “But it’s clear to us, no, they don’t. Not yet.”

A senior administration official, asked for a sign of progress or a recent accomplishment in security matters, struggled with the question until pointing to the extradition to the United States of a few men on drug charges, conceding they were not big fish. Other extradition requests appear stalled; there were 155 last year, mostly for drug offenses, the highest in nearly a decade.

Tuesday evening, less than 48 hours before Mr. Obama’s arrival and with mounting questions on whether Mexico would go after kingpins, Mexico announced it had captured Inés Coronel, the father-in-law of the most-wanted capo, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo. It was unclear if the United States played a role in the arrest.

If so, it would represent a step beyond the Mexican discomfort with Americans operating on their turf that emerged in December, just after Mr. Peña Nieto’s inauguration. It solidified after an explosion on Jan. 31 at the office complex of the state oil company, Pemex, in which 37 people died and more than 120 were injured.

Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were invited to help investigate. But after they suggested in a preliminary assessment that a bomb might have caused the blast, the agency’s role in the investigation was cut short, American officials said, adding that Mexican officials canceled a visit by a team of investigators from the United States.

An administration official said that while American explosives experts were not allowed to contribute as much as they could have to the investigation, creating a sense that the Mexicans were rushing to conclude that the blast was an accident.

On Feb. 4, the attorney general of Mexico announced that the cause was an unexplained buildup of gas, possibly methane, that was ignited by a spark in the basement of one of the buildings.

The American ambassador was invited to the news conference on the findings, but a State Department official said the level of American involvement in the investigation did not warrant the ambassador’s presence. With the American agents leaving the cooperative center in Monterrey, which was first reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, and the development of the one-stop intelligence mechanism, the United States is worried and is seeking more information.

“We’re still figuring out what that means,” a senior administration official said of the new intelligence arrangement.

But the fear is that it will diminish the access that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies have established with branches of the Mexican police and military. Those hard-fought relationships could disintegrate if American agents have to go through a central office to communicate and share knowledge with their Mexican counterparts, some American officials say.

Randal C. Archibold and Damien Cave reported from Mexico City, and Ginger Thompson from New York.

Things are f*cked up in the Arizona National Guard???

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Guard report confirms multiple issues, cites effort to improve

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 3, 2013 12:14 AM

A Department of Defense agency’s report on corrupt conduct in the Arizona National Guard says the state military organization suffers from lax discipline, unethical behavior by commanders, a failure to assist victims of sexual abuse and many other problems.

Gov. Jan Brewer released the report on Thursday, announcing with it that Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar, Arizona’s adjutant general, is preparing to retire this year after three decades of military service.

The 107-page National Guard Bureau assessment contains investigative findings from a team of military officers commissioned by Brewer after an Arizona Republic series in October documented extensive criminal and ethical violations that whistle-blowers blamed on failed discipline and a corrupt culture.

The report verified newspaper accounts of fraud, fraternization, sexual abuse, assault and numerous other crimes, along with favoritism and inconsistent discipline. However, it also concludes that commanders overall are trying to address misconduct and “have been working diligently to improve their practices.”

In a statement released with the report, Brewer declared, “It is clear that the Arizona National Guard is not ‘broken.’ The findings are not an indictment of the Arizona National Guard, nor its leadership. ... Nonetheless, significant concerns were identified, and they will be remedied.”

Brewer added that the level of wrongdoing is “unacceptable,” and she directed Salazar to submit a plan for reform by May 17. “I have depended upon his leadership of the Arizona National Guard,” she added, “and will look for him to provide a steady hand and wise counsel as he transitions to planned retirement.”

However, Lt. Col. Paul Forshey, who recently retired as the National Guard’s top lawyer, or JAG officer, said the report represents a clear indictment of Guard leadership as unethical. He said he was interviewed by investigators, is aware of others’ testimony and has read the report.

“How the governor can reach the conclusion she has is beyond reason or logic,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Salazar declined comment. The report says he “acknowledged there was an ethical leadership issue” when interviewed by team members, and in January published a new conduct code for the Guard.

However, that code restricts whistle-blower activities, barring discussion of internal matters with the media. Guard members contacted on Thursday declined comment because they feared retribution.

In a letter to Brewer, Salazar described the latest assessment as “comprehensive,” adding, “In general, I concur with the majority of findings and recommendations ... I believe the report shows that we are on the right track but that there is more that we can do.”

The investigation was conducted by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams and a team of officers who interviewed 35 witnesses and pored over military records between November 2012 and February. The review team found significant weaknesses in accountability, the reporting of misconduct, administrative actions, military justice and command ethics.

Findings and recommendations were submitted to Brewer by Col. Christian Rofrano, chief counsel for the National Guard Bureau based in Virginia.

Among the key points:

Senior leaders in the Guard have engaged in ethical misconduct, especially sexual relations with subordinates, that “clearly violated” military regulations. “This misconduct created the perception that leadership lacked the moral high ground to take appropriate steps when disciplinary matters arose.”

Full-time soldiers and airmen who committed serious wrongdoing rarely suffered military punishment. Instead, they were allowed to quit their jobs and remain in the National Guard. “Thus the misconduct would continue to permeate the good order and discipline of the organization.”

Prior to 2009, the Arizona Guard did not conduct military courts-martial because of a shortage of funds and a lack of judges. Systemic problems blocked commanders from meting out severe non-judicial punishment.

Victims of sexual abuse said their complaints were neglected or covered up. “Identified victims of sexual assault and harassment stated that they had been victimized twice: Once by the perpetrator and once by the leadership that was unable to address their needs.”

Ethical and criminal violations were “prevalent” among non-commissioned officers who abused their authority and committed fraud that included recruiting graft and forgeries of military records.

The recent culture of the Arizona Guard “did not encourage members to report misconduct,” and those who did were hindered by retaliation from above. “They were specifically told to ‘get on board’ or ‘quit making waves.’” That problem was exacerbated by “a lack of trust in the inspector general and legal offices,” which are supposed to protect victims and whistle-blowers.

Because the Guard does not track civilian criminal cases involving personnel, some soldiers and airmen accrued three or four drunken-driving convictions with no military consequences.

The report recommends new disciplinary policies and procedures, a revision of the Arizona Code of Military Justice, additional training in ethics and leadership, assignment of an advocate to work with victims of sexual abuse or reprisal, and greater coordination with civilian law enforcement.

State Sen. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, who recently called for legislative hearings, said the report “validates concerns I’ve heard from many Arizona Guardsmen.”

“There is a fundamental problem with the organization,” she added. “The governor needs a plan of action to repair it. The question is whether Salazar is the one to develop it.”

Findings released Thursday do not identify perpetrators but list more than 200 individuals accused of past military offenses. That includes a dozen Guard members who were given honorable or general discharges even after being convicted in a drug-smuggling conspiracy.

The report’s overall contents mirror earlier reporting by The Republic. Using Guard records, the newspaper documented drug-smuggling, embezzlement, substance abuse, paintball attacks on civilians, drunken driving and other offenses. It also described how soldiers and airmen who reported wrongdoing became targets of retaliation.

As part of its review, the assessment team surveyed Guard personnel. About half of the respondents described morale as high. Nearly half called for improved leadership ethics, especially regarding fraternization, abuse of authority and fraud. Forty-five percent said favoritism is apparent.

Four out of 10 soldiers and airmen said leaders do not adhere to core values of the military.

There are about 8,000 Guard personnel. Of 2,176 who completed the survey, 15 told of being victimized by an unreported sexual assault within the prior year; 79 told of sexual harassment; 158 said they were victims of discrimination; more than 400 reported racist or sexually offensive displays.

Investigators said they met with numerous victims of adultery between supervisors and subordinates. “Each story was compelling in its impact on the families and the units involved,” they wrote. “Most disturbing was the apparent lack of discretion exhibited by service members that blatantly violated fraternization policies.”

“Fraternization, when engaged in by senior leaders, lays the groundwork for harassment ... and creates a permissive environment where misconduct can occur,” the report said.

A segment of the findings addressed Salazar’s decision to fire Brig. Gen. Michael Colangelo as head of the Air Guard last August after Colangelo dismissed two aviation commanders. A colonel in charge of Predator drone operations was ousted after his pilots allegedly collected $1.1 million in unlawful living expenses. A brigadier general was fired for his handling of a sexual-harassment incident involving the Guard’s only female F-16 pilot.

The Air Force inspector general found Colangelo culpable for abuse of authority. After Colangelo was fired by Salazar, he complained to Brewer. The National Guard Bureau report says Colangelo’s actions were not an abuse of authority because they had been approved by Salazar, military lawyers and Brewer’s staff. The report says that information was withheld from Air Force inspectors, causing them to reach an incorrect finding.

Reach the reporter at dennis.wagner@arizonarepublic.com.

US Foreign policy murders 260,000 in Somalia???

U.S. policy seen as factor in Somalia famine deaths

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

May 2, 2013, 4:07 p.m.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — It was the catastrophe everyone knew was coming yet no one seemed able to stop.

According to analysts, a violent Islamist militia was partly to blame for thousands of deaths in Somalia's food crisis from 2010 to 2012, but so was U.S. anti-terrorism policy.

The effect of nations' collective failure to grapple with the complex problems of getting aid into famine-stricken southern Somalia has only now been established: Nearly 260,000 people died, half of them children younger than 5, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S.-based Famine Early Warning System Network, or FEWS NET, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The death toll, first reported early this week by the Associated Press, was double the worst estimates at the time.

The findings follow the first definitive scientific study on the effects of the food crisis, which found that 10% of children and 4.6% of the overall population in southern Somalia perished.

The FEWS NET warned of the impending disaster in 2010. The famine was declared in July 2011.

According to analysts, the deaths were caused by people and politics: the Islamist militia the Shabab, which denied humanitarian access to the hardest-hit areas and prevented starving people from leaving; local clan warlords, who stole food aid; and the transitional government in Mogadishu, the capital, whose officials diverted aid.

But American policy also played a considerable role, according to analysts, with the Shabab designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2008. U.S. counter-terrorism law imposes sanctions on any group found to be offering even indirect assistance to a terrorist group. Some U.S. and international agencies halted aid deliveries to Shabab-controlled areas, fearing they could be charged with helping a designated terrorist group. In January 2010, the World Food Program suspended aid to southern Somalia, after reports that the Shabab was diverting supplies.

"The short answer — who was to blame — was that there was a syndrome of factors that together created very large problems of access," Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus of Davidson College in North Carolina said in a phone interview. "It wasn't one single factor."

He said the suspension of WFP aid and the U.S. anti-terrorism measure had a "chilling effect" on other humanitarian organizations trying to respond to the Somali crisis. Some agencies, Menkhaus said, were afraid that their global reputations would be damaged if the Shabab ended up with their aid.

"Everyone wanted to get aid in," he said. "But local aid diversion was endemic. One aid agency worker called southern Somalia 'an accountability-free zone.' You could not count on getting aid to the people who needed it most."

Geno Teofilo, spokesman for Oxfam, said his agency believed that the international community put too much emphasis on security issues in the developing world and not enough on humanitarian crises.

"Oxfam believes that when there's a conflict it doesn't matter what side of the control line people are on," Teofilo said in a telephone interview. "When they need food and people are dying of hunger, politics should not play a part. People should be able to receive humanitarian aid, wherever they are."

Jeremy Konyndyk, director of policy for the humanitarian group Mercy Corps, which has worked in the Horn of Africa for many years, said the early warnings of the famine weren't heeded quickly enough across the board.

Nongovernmental organizations "were too slow, the donors were too slow, the U.N. agencies were too slow to gear up," he said. "I think everybody bears some responsibility for this."

But he said humanitarian aid groups learned their lessons from Somalia and responded much more quickly and effectively during the food crisis in Africa's Sahel region a year later.

Konyndyk said the humanitarian aid community was beginning to plan and act in advance to mitigate the effects of recurring famines by supporting peace-building, which enabled people to move more securely to other regions, or small businesses, which allow people to build up a financial cushion.

"The drought that hit the Horn of Africa that year was a once-in-60-years drought," he said. "What happens if we get a once-in-100-years drought? I want to say [the 2011 famine] would never happen again. And I think the kinds of steps that are being taken make it less likely that it will happen again."

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Phoenix City Council members are gun grabbers

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Phoenix police to hold gun-buyback event Saturday

New law soon will hinder similar efforts

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 3, 2013 10:11 PM

Three months before a new state law goes into effect requiring police to sell any weapon they receive, Phoenix officials plan to destroy as many guns as residents bring them.

Those efforts begin Saturday with a gun buyback at three churches in the city, and two more events are scheduled later this month.

After that, gun buybacks coordinated with Phoenix police will likely cease.

A law Gov. Jan Brewer signed this week requires police to sell any weapons they receive, whether the guns are abandoned, lost or forfeited to the agency through a court order. A bill with the same intent — requiring agencies to sell weapons instead of destroying them — was approved last year, but officials in Phoenix, Tucson and other cities took a literal reading of that legislation and determined that it applied only to weapons that departments receive through court-ordered forfeiture.

Police have until the new law takes effect to continue their current practices. In Phoenix, that means destroying weapons.

“There’s been no emergency clause indicating that (the law) is going to go into effect immediately,” Phoenix police Sgt. Steve Martos said of the legislation.

The checks that police want to run on each weapon, which include records queries to ensure that the gun was not reported stolen and a ballis-tics test to determine if the weapon was used in a crime, will take additional time, Martos said.

“Obviously, there’s a little bit of pressure,” said Martos, a department spokesman.

The buyback is anonymous, with no information collected on the donor, and police ask that weapons arrive unloaded and in a trunk or pickup bed where officers can safely remove the guns.

As long as the guns are functioning, they can be exchanged for gift cards.

“It’ll almost be like a drive-through process,” Martos said.

The buybacks should not result in additional costs for police personnel.

The events will be staffed with Phoenix’s neighborhood-enforcement team officers who would already be on the clock and do not typically have “first-responder” duties, Martos said.

A group called Arizonans for Gun Safety donated $100,000 to purchase grocery-store gift cards that will be given out in exchange for weapons, including $200 for assault weapons and $100 for handguns, shotguns and rifles.

That’s far more than police have offered at similar past events, Martos said.

Phoenix police brought in a little more than 200 weapons at the city’s last buyback in 2011, when they had $10,000 worth of gift cards.

“We almost had to start turning people away because we were running out of gift cards,” Martos said.

An event in Tucson in January produced similar results — about 200 weapons for $10,000 worth of grocery gift cards — but came with an unanticipated wave of controversy.

Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik organized the event, which was paid for through private donations he coordinated in about two weeks.

Charles Heller, spokesman for a Tucson-based non-profit that promotes gun rights, said the event was a self-gratifying effort put on by people who want to believe that removing a few hundred weapons from circulation could somehow impact the crime rate.

The new legislation has spurred Tucson residents into action, Kozachik said.

He added that there is no shortage of ideas about how to get around the new law, including suggestions that the weapons be auctioned with a minimum bid of $100,000 to thwart buyers or sold for 1 cent to artists who will melt them down and use them in installations.

He applauded Phoenix’s effort to beat the legislative clock.

The buyback events will be held at from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Southminster Presbyterian, 1923 E. Broadway; Sunnyslope Mennonite Church, 9835 N. Seventh St.; and BetaniaPresbyterian, 2811 N. 39th Ave.

For more information, call 602-547-0976 or go to www.azfgs.com.

U.S. used severe torture on detainees

Mercury News editorial: U.S. used severe torture on detainees

Posted: 05/03/2013 01:00:00 PM PDT

It is indisputable that agents of our government used severe torture techniques on detainees suspected of having terrorist ties. That is the conclusion of a report by an independent panel after an intense, two-year investigation into America's treatment of detainees.

Most of us already figured that was the case, and some -- former Vice President Dick Cheney -- comes to mind -- probably don't care. But to have it confirmed by a credible source is agonizing.

The Constitution Project's Task Force on Detainee Treatment found that the interrogation techniques used were "cruel, inhuman or degrading" and violated U.S. laws as well as international treaties. They ran counter to the values of the Constitution Americans claim to hold sacred.

And despite assertions in the movie "Zero Dark Thirty," the report says little credible information was derived from such techniques, especially as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

The panel acknowledges that it had no subpoena power and that some people claim national security prevents disclosure of what was truly learned. But the task force decided to accept the assertions of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had access to sensitive documents, and found no connection.

The Constitution Project -- a watchdog group that has been around for about 15 years -- undertook the detainee project because no one else would.

Both President Barack Obama and Congress refused to do so. Obama said it would be "unproductive to look backward" and Congress rejected a proposal by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to investigate.

The report is the opposite of unproductive. An honest self-examination is vital to the very essence of democracy and informs future decisions.

For example, panel extensively examined issues surrounding the infamous U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; whether it should be closed and, if so, what should be done with the detainees who are there. Fortunately, Obama is again raising the topic of closing the prison. We suggest this report as good reading for him and Congress as they move forward.

The lengthy report is nonpartisan, fair and doesn't bash individuals. It notes that while much of the rendition activity was prompted by Sept. 11 fear and occurred during the Bush administration, such practices began in the Clinton administration. It also acknowledges that those who undertook questionable measures did so "as their best efforts to protect their fellow citizens."

The Constitutional Project has no veiled agenda. It is co-chaired by Asa Hutchison, a former Republican congressman who served in the Bush administration, and James Jones, a former Democrat congressman who Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base, Cuba. (Brennan Linsley/AP) was chairman of the House Budget Committee and later U.S. ambassador to Mexico. The membership list includes such luminaries as William Sessions, FBI director under three presidents. It conducted on-the-ground fact-finding in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lithuania, Poland, the United Kingdom and, yes, Guantánamo Bay.

Every American should read the findings. The report is online at www.detaineetaskforce.org.

Former U.S. Rep. Renzi’s corruption trial set

Former U.S. Rep. Renzi’s corruption trial set

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Sat May 4, 2013 9:28 PM

Six years after his congressional career ended amid an FBI corruption probe, former U.S. Rep. Rick Renzi is expected to get his day in court with a trial that opens on Tuesday in Tucson.

The three-term Republican House member, who pleaded not guilty, is accused of extortion, fraud, racketeering, money laundering and other crimes involving his insurance business and his conduct as a legislator.

The U.S. District Court case file reveals a web of political intrigue amid a tangle of legal complications. So far, three dozen attorneys have taken part in litigation, which has produced more than 1,145 motions, briefs, responses, judicial rulings and appeals.

Among the mysteries as the trial convenes: Who tipped off federal investigators? Why? What will Renzi’s defense strategy be? And will he take the witness stand?

The defense team declined comment, but it is clear from legal papers that the trial will involve contrasting depictions of the 54-year-old businessman turned politician.

Prosecutors are poised to describe Renzi as a manipulator who embezzled money from business customers, funneled the cash into his election treasury and used his legislative power to profit from an extortion conspiracy.

The defense is geared to present Renzi as a pragmatist whose private and public dealings overlapped but were not criminal; or, perhaps, as the victim of political enemies who dragged him down with help from overzealous federal agents.

Spelling out narratives likely will require more than a month of the trial, dozens of witnesses and tens of thousands of pages of evidence.

“This is just going to be fascinating,” said Mike Black, a Phoenix attorney who briefly represented one of Renzi’s co-defendants. “I might even go down there just to watch.”

Winding through appeals

Renzi was first indicted in February 2008 and eventually faced 49 felony counts.

The charges arise from two sets of allegations that, if true, would constitute a betrayal of the public trust and corruption of the U.S. political system: First, Renzi is accused of defrauding clients at his Patriot Insurance Agency by taking funds that were intended as premiums and using the money to win his first House race in 2002. Second, Renzi is charged with orchestrating a land-swap deal after taking office to benefit a real-estate investor who owed him money.

While it is not unusual for white-collar cases to defy the speedy-trial model of justice, Renzi’s litigation has been particularly glacial due to rare constitutional issues that come with prosecution of a former member of Congress.

Delays included two appeals handled by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and numerous hearings to resolve disputes.

Defense attorneys partially succeeded in efforts to get charges thrown out and evidence suppressed but failed in a bid to disqualify the Justice Department team based on claims of prosecutorial misconduct. Among the pretrial issues that had to be sorted out by U.S. District Judge David Bury:

FBI agents who monitored wiretaps improperly listened to phone calls between Renzi and his attorneys, destroyed their notes and misled a judge about the conversations. Bury found the government’s conduct egregious and suppressed all evidence from electronic surveillance. [Sadly the police routinely act like the criminals they are trying to arrest. When FBI agents and other cops routinely lie in their daily work, how can we possibly expect them to tell the truth in a trial.]

Defense attorneys contended that charges of embezzlement were bogus because, as Renzi’s companies were structured, he merely borrowed money. The Appeals Court agreed.

Perhaps most significantly, defense lawyers contended that all charges related to the land-swap deal should be dropped because a clause in the U.S. Constitution prohibits the criminal investigation of a federal lawmaker for legislative acts.

Under the so-called Speech or Debate Clause, Renzi’s attorneys argued, the Justice Department violated U.S. law not just by wiretapping the congressman, but by interviewing his staffers and obtaining his records.

The constitutional provision was drafted to prevent the executive branch from using its law-enforcement authority as a political weapon against opponents in Congress. Members of the House and Senate are generally immune to criminal prosecution for their legislative conduct.

In this case, House lawyers filed briefs supporting Renzi’s legal position while the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington argued on behalf of the government.

The Speech or Debate question went to the 9th Circuit, which ruled that Renzi’s conduct was not protected.

Still, the issue is likely to resurface during the trial, and House lawyers have asked to remain as players in future courtroom disputes.

Setbacks for prosecutors

The government has suffered a number of setbacks leading up to the trial.

Sixteen counts against Renzi have been dismissed so far, including a tax charge that was thrown out a few weeks ago. Andrew Beardall, Renzi’s lawyer in the insurance case, was acquitted. Dwayne Lequire, the insurance-company accountant, was found guilty but the Appeals Court overturned his verdict and issued an acquittal.

The investigation and prosecution have cost U.S. taxpayers and defendants untold millions. Lequire is now seeking more than $400,000 from the government as compensation for his legal expenses. His attorney, Mark Willimann, said the Justice Department keeps losing in Renzi’s case because prosecutors went “well beyond the realm of decency” in filing charges.

Although the case was launched under the administration of Republican President George W. Bush and former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, also a Republican, Willimann said he believes it was orchestrated by Democrats to oust a GOP incumbent.

“This is purely political,” he said. “Renzi did nothing wrong here. ... I think the government is in (cover-up) mode. They’ve got a tiger by the tail, and they didn’t realize the tail was long enough for Mr. Renzi to turn around and bite them.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment.

Controversial mine plan

Richard George Renzi, an insurance and real-estate entrepreneur who also owned a southern Arizona vineyard, was elected to Arizona’s 1st Congressional District in 2002, the year he got his law degree. He was viewed as a conservative Catholic with 12 kids and a wide-open political future.

In 2005, Resolution Copper Mining was seeking to trade about 5,000 acres of private property for 2,400 acres of government land near Superior — a parcel containing one of America’s richest remaining copper deposits. Mining plans call for excavation up to 7,000 feet underground to exploit an estimated $61 billion in ore, providing 3,700 jobs.

Such real-estate swaps require congressional approval.

According to prosecutors, Renzi vowed to block legislation unless Resolution purchased and included a 480-acre alfalfa field from business associate James Sandlin, who owed him money. On the other hand, if Sandlin’s property was part of the deal, Renzi ensured approval, according to prosecutors. [If you ask me that sure sounds like a conflict of interest.]

Sandlin, convicted by a Texas jury in 2008 on related charges of filing false financial information, is going to trial on Tuesday with Renzi to face additional charges. His attorney did not respond to an interview request.

The indictment says Resolution balked at Renzi’s extortion attempt. A group of other speculators, including former Arizona governor and ex-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, then bought Sandlin’s land and agreed to make it part of the exchange, according to the indictment, and Renzi introduced legislation to authorize the deal.

That bill died after FBI agents raided Renzi’s home and news leaked of a possible indictment. It is impossible to say whether the scandal damaged future prospects for the controversial land swap. However, 11 bills have failed in Congress so far, opposed by some conservation groups, the Apache tribe and Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz..

In December, Resolution announced that it was dismissing 400 workers and essentially abandoning the project.

Two months later, Arizona’s congressional delegation offered a 12th version of the land-exchange bill. That, too, appears to be stalled.

Grijalva said he has repeatedly voted against the project because Resolution and its congressional sponsors will not agree to an environmental review and a more careful valuation of the copper reserves before the deal is struck. He said the Superior mine could have severe ecological impacts but would be nearly impossible to stop if land is transferred into private ownership.

Grijalva said Renzi’s trial may bring out more information about the land-exchange deal and the mining company’s role.

“It puts Resolution Copper front and center,” he said. “I think there’s some exposure that’s going to happen. ... And I believe the asset in the ground — the copper — is worth much, much more than the trade we’re getting.”

Grijalva and others said Resolution officials have been portrayed as “white hats” — good guys who blew the whistle on corruption — but Renzi’s defense attorneys likely will challenge their motives and credibility.

“This trial is as much a difficult situation for the company as it is for Renzi,” he said. “The defense is going to be vigorous, and it has to be against the company.”

Resolution Copper has been represented by lobbyist Ron Ober, a longtime Democratic Party operative who once served as chief of staff for former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz. Ober works with public-relations specialist Troy Corder, a former staffer for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Arizona Govs. Fife Symington and Jane Dee Hull.

Neither Ober nor Corder would comment on the Renzi trial or its impact on the planned copper project in Superior.

Jennifer Russo, director of communications at Resolution’s parent company, Rio Tinto Copper Group, said the land-swap bill was affected by Renzi’s controversy while he was in office, but today’s legislation is moving forward with bipartisan support. She emphasized that, in the criminal case, Resolution “did nothing wrong and is a cooperating government witness.”

If a land swap is approved, Russo said, a full environmental report will be completed before mining gets under way.

“We are pleased with the progress being made in the 113th Congress,” she added, “and we are working through all issues and concerns that have been raised.”

Reach the reporter at dennis.wagner@arizonarepublic.com.

Timeline

2001

Republican Rick Renzi runs for Congress. Authorities later allege that he funneled money from insurance clients into his campaign treasury.

2002

Renzi wins election over Democrat George Cordova.

Federal Election Commission orders audit of Renzi campaign finances.

2004

FEC audit says Renzi made $369,000 in “impermissible” loans to his campaign.

Renzi is re-elected, defeating Paul Babbitt.

2005

Resolution Copper begins trying to orchestrate a real-estate swap to obtain copper-rich federal land near Superior.

Authorities allege that Renzi told Resolution that there will be no deal unless property owned by business associate James Sandlin is included. Resolution reportedly balks.

2006

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington names Renzi among 20 “most corrupt” members of Congress.

Department of Justice secretly approves FBI wiretaps and search warrants targeting Renzi.

News leaks of possible indictment.

Renzi is elected to a third term, defeating Ellen Simon.

2007

FBI raids Renzi’s business.

Renzi resigns from House Intelligence Committee, then announces he will not seek a fourth term.

2008

Renzi is indicted on 35 counts.

A superseding indictment lists 49 felonies.

2010

All wiretap evidence is suppressed from Renzi’s future trial due to FBI misconduct.

Judge refuses to disqualify Justice Department team for prosecutorial misconduct.

2011

9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to throw out case based on claims of congressional immunity.

2012

After failure of 11 land-swap bills, Resolution Copper shuts down planned operations near Superior.

2013

Members of Arizona delegation introduce new land-exchange measure.

May 7: Renzi trial scheduled to begin.

Source: U.S. District Court records and Arizona Republic archives

Arizona National Guard system is broken

Source

Guard system is broken

The Republic | azcentral.com Mon May 6, 2013 6:39 PM

A 107-page Department of Defense agency report on the Arizona National Guard found lax discipline, unethical behavior by top commanders, cronyism, evidence of fraud, sexual harassment, cover-ups of sexual harassment and harassment of whistle-blowers attempting to call attention to rampant harassment.

Yet Gov. Jan Brewer insists the Arizona Guard command structure is “not broken”?

We had better define “broken,” then. Because the evidence first unearthed by Arizona Republic reporter Dennis Wagner and verified by the recently released report from the Defense Department’s National Guard Bureau depicts an Arizona Guard whose credibility at the top looks nigh on shattered.

It’s natural for a top executive to come to the defense of a subordinate who is taking it on the chin from critics on the outside. It’s a form of self-defense.

There are limits, though, and Arizona’s top exec appears to be bumping hard against them.

Brewer’s sense of loyalty to Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar certainly has been consistent. In fairness, many of the problems Wagner reported occurred before Salazar’s appointment as the Arizona National Guard adjutant general in April 2009.

But many of the problems persisted, in particular an iron-willed resistance to criticism from outsiders, including nosy reporters like Wagner. Salazar and other top officers clearly viewed whistle-blowers as snitches — so much so that Salazar’s much-anticipated new code of conduct released in January included new restrictions on anyone discussing internal matters with the media.

Rather than encourage guardsmen to report perceived misconduct, the new rules instituted by Salazar have done the opposite. According to the official report, that policy of prodding enlisted personnel to “quit making waves” contributed to a sense, particularly among harassment victims, of having been victimized twice — once by the perpetrator and again by a system designed to protect the perps.

The Arizona National Guard is a vital state and national resource with a laudable history. But as Wagner’s insightful series described, the static nature of the National Guard can create problems that are less of an issue in the regular military, where officers and enlisted personnel are regularly transferred.

Guard personnel serve where they live. And a Guard command structure that fails to diligently address the inherent dangers of overly familiar personnel risks just the sort of chaos that has visited the Arizona Guard.

On the positive side, a survey by the team of investigators, led by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams, found that at least half of the state’s 8,000 Guard personnel considered morale to be high. On the down side, the same survey found that Guard personnel remain concerned about rampant, casual fraternization, particularly among non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel. That latter is a condition destined to destroy whatever high morale remains.

Gov. Brewer’s response to the investigation notes Maj. Gen. Salazar’s “planned retirement,” scheduled for later this year.

We join Brewer in acknowledging Salazar’s 30-year military career. But after the release of a National Guard report as critical as this one, Salazar should step down now, rather than later.

We hope the governor develops a more clear-eyed appreciation for the performance of Salazar’s replacement.

If the National Guard Bureau’s assessment doesn’t suggest a “broken” command structure, then the Arizona National Guard must exist in a world made of Play-Doh.

Imprisoned at Guantanamo - America's Honor!!!!

Police officer accidentally shot in leg by fellow cop

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Police officer accidentally shot in leg by fellow cop

By Rosemary Regina Sobol and Adam Sege Tribune reporters

7:33 a.m. CDT, May 7, 2013

A Chicago police officer was shot in the leg by a fellow officer who had fired at a charging dog Monday night in the Englewood neighborhood, authorities said.

The shooting happened about 9 p.m. in the 1200 block of West 72nd Place as Englewood District officers were responding to a call of a burglary in progress, according to a police statement.

Two officers and a supervisor went to the second-floor landing of the building, where they were confronted by a "vicious dog," according to police.

When the dog charged toward them, an officer fired a single shot that struck the dog and also hit another officer in the thigh, according to a police source. It was unclear if the bullet struck the officer or the dog first, the source said.

Paramedics took the 42-year-old officer in good condition to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where he was treated and released, authorities said.

Investigators from the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority responded to the scene, spokesman Larry Merritt said.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

San Jose cop frames man for rape with phoney lab report!!!

Next if you are naive as a 3 year old you probably think San Jose Police officer Sgt. Matthew Christian was fired and sent to prison for his crimes. Again don't make me laugh!!!

However, the police officer, Sgt. Matthew Christian, remains on the job and is now assigned to the Traffic Investigations Unit, said SJPD spokesman Albert Morales.

In hopes of extracting a confession, Christian created a "ruse" crime report indicating that Kerkeles' semen had been found on a blanket, while the actual report revealed no semen. Such a tactic is legal -- at that stage of a case.

If you read up on the "9 Step Reid Method" you will discover it is a modern variation of the old "beat em with a rubber hose" method used to get confessions by the police.

Only the physical rubber hose is replaced with a "mental rubber hose", and the physical beating is replaced by a "mental beating".

The "9 Step Reid Method" routinely gets false confessions.

Source

San Jose poised to settle case involving cop and phony lab report

By Tracey Kaplan

tkaplan@mercurynews.com

Posted: 05/06/2013 06:12:00 PM PDT

SAN JOSE -- A local man who was held over for trial on the basis of a phony lab report cooked up by a police officer and presented in court by a prosecutor is poised to win a legal settlement with the city for $150,000.

On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council is expected to approve the settlement with Michael Kerkeles of San Jose. Under the agreement, the city must also pay Kerkeles' legal fees, which could be at least $1 million because the federal civil rights case dragged on for six years and included a hard-fought appeal.

Kerkeles declined to comment, but one of his lawyers said the case has taken a major toll on him. Not only was Kerkeles at work when the sexual assault of a developmentally disabled woman supposedly occurred, the lawyer said, but his wife also was in her home office, steps from where the alleged rape took place.

"It's a significant sum, but Mr. Kerkeles certainly wouldn't trade the money he got for what he went through," lawyer Matt Davis said.

Fake crime report

The evidence that Kerkeles' rights had been violated was bolstered last year when prosecutor Jaime Stringfield admitted she misled the court about the lab report. She was suspended for a month by the state Supreme Court, based on a recommendation by the State Bar, which licenses attorneys. She had already resigned from the District Attorney's Office to pursue a teaching career, but is currently licensed to practice law.

However, the police officer, Sgt. Matthew Christian, remains on the job and is now assigned to the Traffic Investigations Unit, said SJPD spokesman Albert Morales.

The injustice unfolded after Kerkeles was accused in 2005 of sexually assaulting the developmentally disabled neighbor with the mental acuity of a 7-year-old.

In hopes of extracting a confession, Christian created a "ruse" crime report indicating that Kerkeles' semen had been found on a blanket, while the actual report revealed no semen. Such a tactic is legal -- at that stage of a case.

Kerkeles asked for an attorney, so the report was never actually used as a ruse. Instead, it was presented in court after the District Attorney's Office lost two preliminary hearings in the case.

'Huge mistake'

On both occasions, the judge found the woman was not a competent witness and there was insufficient evidence to hold Kerkeles over for trial on charges.

But at the third preliminary hearing, then-prosecutor Stringfield elicited testimony from officer Christian regarding the contents of the ruse report. The officer's testimony was that semen had been found on the blanket, prompting the court to find there was probable cause to hold Kerkeles over for trial.

"In our view, that was a huge mistake," San Jose City Attorney Rick Doyle said, referring to the presentation of the phony document in court and Sgt. Matthew Christian's testimony about it.

There were several indications that the report was false. For one thing, the officer used a phony name for the crime lab analyst. It was also dated within a day of the evidence being seized -- contrary to normal DNA examinations, which take considerably longer to complete. Stringfield had in her file a real report that did not find semen on the bedspread.

"It's a good number ($150,000) to settle the case for," the city attorney said, "given the (legal) risks."

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com/tkaplanreport.

Emperor Obama is a liar and hypocrite???

Whistle-blowers: Rescue requests denied in Libya attack

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Whistle-blowers: Rescue requests denied in Libya attack

By Oren Dorell USA Today Tue May 7, 2013 11:49 AM

Revelations from State Department "whistle-blowers" on the Benghazi terror attack that left the U.S. ambassador of Libya dead will show that requests for military rescue were turned down and that the White House was immediately aware that the CIA concluded the attackers were linked to al-Qaeda.

Documents released by various Congressional committees and excerpts of interviews provided by the House oversight committee appear to contradict the description of events as provided by the Pentagon, the White House and then-secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Among them:

• The U.S. military refused to send jets over a raging battlefield in Benghazi in an attempt to scatter the attackers.

• The Pentagon's Africa command refused to let a Special Forces team in Tripoli fly the short distance to Benghazi in an attempt to rescue U.S. personnel.

• The CIA told the White House the attack was a coordinated assault by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists. But the White House and State Department publicly blamed the attack on a spontaneous mob angered over an anti-Islam video, and claimed the reports of terrorists was not learned until later.

• The State Department never activated a foreign emergency response team, which assists diplomats under attack. A State official will testify this was done to avoid the appearance that a terrorist attack had happened.

The revelations come from witnesses who will appear in public Wednesday before the House oversight committee. Scheduled to speak are Mark Thompson, acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism; Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission and chargé d'affairs in Libya, and Eric Nordstrom, the former regional security officer in Libya. All are current State Department employees.

The information they have already provided committee staffers, together with published reports from other committees, paint a picture of a White House and State Department that tried to prevent information about a terrorist attack from being exposed just weeks before President Obama faced re-election, according Frederick Hill, spokesman for the oversight committee.

"These witnesses have information that has not previously come forward because the administration has tried to suppress it," Hill said. "The testimony of the former deputy chief of mission directly contradicts statements made by high-ranking officials."

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed in the attack along with State Department employee Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. The State Department's Accountability Review Board, appointed by Clinton, later issued a report saying the military assets in the region could not have saved the Americans.

While it was clear from the start that terrorists were involved, that information was scrubbed from talking points memos distributed by the White House, according to the witnesses and investigations conducted by various Republican-led committees in the House of Representatives.

Hicks, who became the top U.S. official in Libya after Stevens' death, told committee staffers he pushed for a stronger military response to an attack he knew from the start was launched by Islamist terrorists, but was rebuffed by Washington, according to excerpts of interview transcripts provided by the House oversight committee.

Hicks said he asked twice whether an F-16 or some other "fast-mover" aircraft could fly over the battlefield with hopes it would scatter the attackers.

"I talked with the Defense Attache, Lt. Col. Keith Phillips, and I asked him, 'Is there anything coming?' "

According to Hicks' account, Phillips said the nearest fighter planes were in Aviano, Italy, and it would take two to three hours to get them airborne, and there were no tanker assets close enough to support them.

Hicks says when he asked again, before the 5:15 a.m. mortar attack that killed Doherty and Woods, "the answer, again, was the same as before."

Hicks says he believes the Libyan government would have approved the flyover and that it would have been effective because the militias "were under no illusions that American and NATO air power won that war for them," he said.

"If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split," according to Hicks' excerpts.

"The Libyans would have split. They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them."

A four-man team of military special operations forces was told not to board a Libyan military flight from Tripoli to Benghazi to reinforce troops sent to defend U.S. diplomatic personnel, Hicks said.

A previous team had already arrived at Benghazi at 1:15 a.m., Hicks said. Less than two hours later, Hicks received a phone call from then-prime minister of Libya, Mohammed Magarief, reporting that Stevens had died. His death meant Hicks was then in charge of the U.S. mission in Libya.

A second special forces team was organized, geared up and about to drive to a C-130 aircraft, when its commander, Lt. Col. Gibson, was ordered to stop by his superiors, Hicks said.

"He got a phone call from SOCAFRICA (Special Operations Command Africa) which said, you can't go now, you don't have authority to go now," Hicks said. "They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."

Hicks said Gibson told him: "I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military."

Hicks said he believed the military stopped the trip because "they just didn't have the right authority from the right level."

Maj. Robert Firman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday: "There was never any kind of stand-down order to anybody."

State Department and White House officials scrubbed any mention of terrorism from Benghazi talking points given to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, before she went on Sunday talk shows five days after the attack, according to a report by five House committees that investigated how that happened.

The CIA on Sept. 14 circulated a memo that said it had issued numerous warnings about al-Qaeda-linked extremists in Benghazi and throughout Libya. According to the Weekly Standard, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland objected that the CIA report gave the appearance that State did not heed agency warnings. By the time work on the memo was complete the next day, the Standard reported, mention of al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists was gone.

F*ck the 4th Amendment the FBI has a God give right to spy on you!!!!

And the FBI is demanding that internet companies provide them with the capability to flush your 4th Amendment rights down the toilet.

Source

U.S. Is Weighing Wide Overhaul of Wiretap Laws

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: May 7, 2013 305 Comments

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has argued that the bureau’s ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is “going dark” as communications technology evolves, and since 2010 has pushed for a legal mandate requiring companies like Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging and other such systems a capacity to comply with wiretap orders. That proposal, however, bogged down amid concerns by other agencies, like the Commerce Department, about quashing Silicon Valley innovation.

While the F.B.I.’s original proposal would have required Internet communications services to each build in a wiretapping capacity, the revised one, which must now be reviewed by the White House, focuses on fining companies that do not comply with wiretap orders. The difference, officials say, means that start-ups with a small number of users would have fewer worries about wiretapping issues unless the companies became popular enough to come to the Justice Department’s attention.

Still, the plan is likely to set off a debate over the future of the Internet if the White House submits it to Congress, according to lawyers for technology companies and advocates of Internet privacy and freedom.

“I think the F.B.I.’s proposal would render Internet communications less secure and more vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves,” said Gregory T. Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It would also mean that innovators who want to avoid new and expensive mandates will take their innovations abroad and develop them there, where there aren’t the same mandates.”

Andrew Weissmann, the general counsel of the F.B.I., said in a statement that the proposal was aimed only at preserving law enforcement officials’ longstanding ability to investigate suspected criminals, spies and terrorists subject to a court’s permission.

“This doesn’t create any new legal surveillance authority,” he said. “This always requires a court order. None of the ‘going dark’ solutions would do anything except update the law given means of modern communications.”

A central element of the F.B.I.’s 2010 proposal was to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act — a 1994 law that already requires phone and network carriers to build interception capabilities into their systems — so that it would also cover Internet-based services that allow people to converse. But the bureau has now largely moved away from that one-size-fits-all mandate.

Instead, the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not. The shift in thinking toward the judicial fines was first reported by The Washington Post, and additional details were described to The New York Times by several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Under the proposal, officials said, for a company to be eligible for the strictest deadlines and fines — starting at $25,000 a day — it must first have been put on notice that it needed surveillance capabilities, triggering a 30-day period to consult with the government on any technical problems.

Such notice could be the receipt of its first wiretap order or a warning from the attorney general that it might receive a surveillance request in the future, officials said, arguing that most small start-ups would never receive either.

Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who advises communications providers, said that aspect of the plan appeared to be modeled on a British law, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000.

Foreign-based communications services that do business in the United States would be subject to the same procedures, and would be required to have a point of contact on domestic soil who could be served with a wiretap order, officials said.

Albert Gidari Jr., who represents technology companies on law enforcement matters, criticized that proposed procedure. He argued that if the United States started imposing fines on foreign Internet firms, it would encourage other countries, some of which may be looking for political dissidents, to penalize American companies if they refused to turn over users’ information.

“We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this,” Mr. Gidari said.

The expanded fines would also apply to phone and network carriers, like Verizon and AT&T, which are separately subject to the 1994 wiretapping capacity law. The FBI has argued that such companies sometimes roll out system upgrades without making sure that their wiretap capabilities will keep working.

The 1994 law would be expanded to cover peer-to-peer voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP — calls between computers that do not connect to the regular phone network. Such services typically do not route data packets through any central hub, making them difficult to intercept.

The F.B.I. has abandoned a component of its original proposal that would have required companies that facilitate the encryption of users’ messages to always have a key to unscramble them if presented with a court order. Critics had charged that such a law would create back doors for hackers. The current proposal would allow services that fully encrypt messages between users to keep operating, officials said.

In November 2010, Mr. Mueller toured Silicon Valley and briefed executives on the proposal as it then existed, urging them not to lobby against it, but the firms have adopted a cautious stance. In February 2011, the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time testified about the “going dark” problem at a House hearing, emphasizing that there was no administration proposal yet. Still, several top lawmakers at the hearing expressed skepticism, raising fears about innovation and security.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a former Justice Department lawyer who advises communications providers and commented on one aspect of the F.B.I.’s plan to overhaul surveillance laws. He is Michael Sussmann, not Sussman.

Government is really good at wasting money!!!!

Source

With 10 patterns, U.S. military branches out on camouflage front

By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: May 8

In 2002, the U.S. military had just two kinds of camouflage uniforms. One was green, for the woods. The other was brown, for the desert.

Then things got strange.

Today, there is one camouflage pattern just for Marines in the desert. There is another just for Navy personnel in the desert. The Army has its own “universal” camouflage pattern, which is designed to work anywhere. It also has another one just for Afghanistan, where the first one doesn’t work.

Even the Air Force has its own unique camouflage, used in a new Airman Battle Uniform. But it has flaws. So in Afghanistan, airmen are told not to wear it in battle.

In just 11 years, two kinds of camouflage have turned into 10. And a simple aspect of the U.S. government has emerged as a complicated and expensive case study in federal duplication.

Duplication is one of Washington’s most expensive traditions: Multiple agencies do the same job at the same time, and taxpayers pay billions for the government to repeat itself.

The habit remains stubbornly hard to break, even in an era of austerity. There are, for instance, at least 209 federal programs to improve science and math skills. There are 16 programs that teach personal finance.

At the Pentagon, the story of the multiplying uniforms has provided a step-by-step illustration of how duplication blooms in government — and why it’s usually not good.

“If you have 10 patterns, some of them are going to be good. Some of them are going to be bad. Some of them are going to be in the middle,” said Timothy O’Neill, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who studied camouflage patterns as a West Point professor. “Who wants to have the second-best pattern?”

The duplication problem grows out of three qualities that are deeply rooted in Washington. Good intentions. Little patience. And a lust for new turf.

When a bureaucrat or lawmaker sees someone else doing a job poorly, those qualities stir an itch to take over the job.

“You don’t have empirical information on what’s working and what’s not working” in the profusion of new programs, said Gene Dodaro, who heads the Government Accountability Office (GAO). He hopes the country will finally decide it can’t afford this. “The fiscal situation . . . will begin to force that kind of decision to be made,” he said.

President Obama and congressional Republicans say they’re trying to prune back decades of redundant programs. Obama, for example, is seeking to kill or consolidate more than 100 of those science and math programs. But the problem lives on in many other places.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, has a new congressionally mandated Office of Financial Education. It costs $7.87 million a year and is authorized to employ 14 people.

It is, by the GAO’s count, the 16th government program aimed at teaching the public better money management. And that shows.

At the Pentagon, a GAO study commissioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the military services have spent more than $12 million on designing new camouflage patterns. The cost of buying, stocking and shipping 10 different types of camouflage uniforms is believed to be millions more.

Is anybody trying to fix this?

“The Department of Defense continues to look for ways to streamline processes and implement better business practices,” a Pentagon spokesman said this week. He gave no details.

Uniform, but unique

This, in brief, is how two camouflage patterns became 10.

The Marine Corps started it. The branch spent two years and $319,000 testing patterns to replace the green and brown ones. In the end, the Marines settled on a digital design, which used small pixels to help troops blend in.

There was a desert version and a woodland version — camouflage pattern Nos. 3 and 4.

The Marines did not intend to share them.

“The people who saw this uniform in a combat area would know [the wearers] were United States Marines, for whatever that might mean,” said retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, who initiated the uniform design and later became Obama’s national security adviser.

After that, the Army set out to duplicate what the Marines had done, spending at least $2.63 million on its own camouflage research. The Army produced what it called a “universal” camouflage, in shades of green, gray and tan. Pattern No. 5.

It was not as universal as they said.

After complaints that the pattern didn’t work in Afghanistan, the Army had to spend $2.9 million to design a camouflage specific to that country. The GAO found that the Army then spent more than $30 million to outfit troops with the new design, called Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage. Pattern No. 6.

Now, the Army is working to replace that replacement, with a new camouflage-design effort that has cost at least $4.2 million so far. The branch has given up on “universal.”

“A uniform that is specific to the desert and one that is specific to a woodland environment . . . outperform a single pattern, a universal camouflage pattern,” Brig. Gen. Paul A. Ostrowski, who oversees the Army’s uniform and equipment research, said in testimony before Congress last month. “We’ve learned that.”

Pattern No. 7 came from the Air Force. On the surface, that did not make a whole lot of sense: Only a subset of Air Force personnel fight on the ground, including rescuers of downed pilots and battlefield air controllers. But the branch still spent $3.1 million to come up with its own ground combat uniform. It was a “tiger stripe” pattern, a throwback to camouflage used in the Vietnam War.

But it was not well-suited to Afghanistan.

“They were not designed to hide anybody. They were designed to look cool,” said O’Neill, the West Point camouflage expert, giving his outside appraisal of the Air Force design. “It’s what we call ‘CDI Factor.’ Which is, ‘Chicks dig it.’ ”

Finally, in 2010, the Air Force ordered its personnel in Afghanistan to ditch the Airman Battle Uniform and wear Army camouflage instead. The Army pattern “provides the higher level of protection and functionality our airmen need,” an Air Force spokeswoman said this week.

Lost in the camouflage

The next three camouflage patterns arrived in 2011, from another unlikely source: the Navy.

“The Marine Corps, Air Force and Army had either all shifted, or were shifting. Which meant that if we wanted to continue using [the two original patterns], the Navy was going to have to pick up the entire contract,” said Terry Scott, who was the service’s top enlisted man at the time, the master chief petty officer of the Navy. “We knew we had to change.”

He said, “I remember saying, ‘Why don’t we just use the exact same thing’ ” as the Marine Corps? “Well, the Marine Corps had embedded . . . their symbol in the actual uniform pattern.”

It was true. The Marines had inserted tiny eagles, globes and anchors into the camouflage — betting that no other service would go to war with another branch’s logo on its pants. It worked.

The Navy spent more than $435,000 on three new designs. One was a blue-and-gray pattern, to be worn aboard ships. Pattern No. 8.

Sailors worried that it would hide them at the one time they would want to be found.

“You fall in the damn water and you’re wearing water-colored camouflage. What the hell is that?” said one active-duty petty officer. He asked that his name be withheld because he was criticizing a decision by the brass. “It’s not logical. It’s not logical at all to have water-colored uniforms.”

For the desert, the Navy came up with another design, a tan pattern that resembled the Marines’ desert pattern. Except theirs had a small USS Constitution embedded in the pattern. No. 9.

To the Marines, the Navy pattern was still too close a copy.

“We objected to that. We just said, ‘Look, there are plenty of patterns that are out there that are effective,’ ” said Gen. James F. Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, recounting that complaint during a Senate hearing in 2010. The reason was not battlefield safety, it was Marine pride.

“Even though [the Navy] is not using the patented pattern, I guess that it’s so very, very close,” Amos said. “It’s a point of pride, sir. It’s internal pride.”

That seemed a good enough reason for the Senate committee: “Well, pride and unit elan is certainly an important factor. I appreciate your response,” said then-Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). The next question was about helicopters.

It was also good enough for the Navy. After the Marines objected, the Navy decreed that its new desert uniform would be given only to a select few: Navy SEALs and other personnel serving with them.

The rest of the Navy personnel who might serve in the desert — more than 50,000 of them — were issued a different camouflage pattern.

This was pattern No. 10. The Pentagon’s long and expensive search for new camouflage uniforms had previously defied logic. Now it would defy camouflage itself.

It ended with U.S. service members wearing green in the desert.

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IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

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IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

Associated Press Fri May 10, 2013 9:03 AM

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out.

Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

The forms, which the groups made available at the time, sought information about group members’ political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.

Certain tax-exempt charitable groups can conduct political activities but it cannot be their primary activity.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views.

“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush. His 6-year term ended in November. President Barack

U.S. wants to keep 9 bases in Afghanistan after 2014

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Karzai: U.S. wants to keep 9 bases in Afghanistan after 2014

KABUL, Afghanistan Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday he was ready to let the U.S. have nine bases in the country after the 2014 combat troop pullout, but wants Washington's "security and economic guarantees" first.

Speaking at a ceremony on Thursday at Kabul University, Karzai said Afghanistan is ready to sign a partnership agreement to that effect.

The remarks were the first time the Afghan leader had offered any insight into ongoing talks over a deal that would outline American presence in Afghanistan after 2014.

CBS News Kabul bureau chief Mukhtar Ahmad reports that, according to Karzai, the U.S. wants to maintain bases in Kabul, Herat, Helmand, Shindand, Gardez, Mazar, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Bagram.

Karzai said Afghanistan wants a U.S. commitment to quickly bring security to the country, strengthen its security forces and the promise of prolonged economic development.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment.

3,000 drone murders by America???

According to this article the American government has murdered about 3,000 people with drones.

"about 3,000 foreigners have been killed in [American] drone attacks"

Bringing drones out of the shadows

By The Times editorial board

May 13, 2013

The use of unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists, a practice that has dramatically escalated during the Obama administration, is receiving fresh and welcome scrutiny in Congress and elsewhere even as the number of drone strikes seems to be on the decline. Last week, Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of a House armed services subcommittee, introduced legislation to require the Pentagon to promptly inform Congress about every drone strike outside Afghanistan as well as about operations to kill or capture terrorists away from declared war zones.

And in a speech at Oxford University, Harold Koh, who until recently served as the State Department's legal advisor, criticized the administration for not being "sufficiently transparent to the media, to the Congress and to our allies." He urged the administration to publicize its standards for placing targets — Americans and others — on kill lists and to offer a clear tally of civilian casualties.

This page has repeatedly criticized the administration for its lack of transparency about the targeted killing of terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and for its troublingly elastic definition of what constitutes an "imminent" attack on Americans that would justify the killing of a U.S. citizen abroad by drones or other means. The legality of targeting citizens without due process of law is an urgent issue.

But a debate about drones and targeted killings can't be limited to questions about disclosure, accountability to Congress and legal standards. Nor should legitimate concern about the killing of Americans obscure the fact that about 3,000 foreigners have been killed in drone attacks, some of them high-level Al Qaeda operatives but many others "unknown extremists."

As Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official, put it in recent testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee: "Over the last decade, we have seen U.S. drone strikes evolve from a tool used in extremely limited circumstances to go after specifically identified high-ranking Al Qaeda officials, to a tool relied on in an increasing number of countries to go after an eternally lengthening list of putative bad actors, with increasingly tenuous links to grave or imminent threats to the United States. Some of these suspected terrorists have been identified by name and specifically targeted, while others are increasingly targeted on the basis of suspicious behavior patterns."

Though estimates vary, it seems that hundreds of civilians also have died in drone strikes, a source of anti-American outrage in Pakistan and Yemen. That drones are more precise than manned jet bomber is small consolation for the families of those victims. In testimony before the Senate committee, Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni activist and writer educated in the United States, described the effects on his village of a strike: "For almost all of the people in Wessab, I'm the only person with any connection to the United States. They called and texted me that night with questions that I could not answer: 'Why was the United States terrifying them with these drones? Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?"

When even former officials of the Obama administration are expressing qualms about drones and targeted killings, it behooves the president and his advisors to reconsider the scope and utility of the policy. There are indications that such a reappraisal is underway. The Times has reported that administration officials are moving to shift authority for drone strikes from the CIA back to the Defense Department. There also have been reports that the administration will eliminate so-called signature strikes that are aimed not at particular individuals but at suspicious behavior, such as the massing of vehicles in areas thought to be under the control of Al Qaeda or similar groups.

For all their technological novelty, drones are weapons, and their use raises the perennial question of when and under what safeguards deadly force should be used to protect the national interest. More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks that provided the ultimate authority for the drone campaign, it's time to take stock of whether that policy still makes sense.

Government obtains wide AP phone records in probe

Government obtains wide AP phone records in probe

By Mark Sherman Associated Press Mon May 13, 2013 2:10 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP's source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an "unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information."

Prosecutors have sought phone records from reporters before, but the seizure of records from such a wide array of AP offices, including general AP switchboards numbers and an office-wide shared fax line, is unusual and largely unprecedented.

In the letter notifying the AP received Friday, the Justice Department offered no explanation for the seizure, according to Pruitt's letter and attorneys for the AP. The records were presumably obtained from phone companies earlier this year although the government letter did not explain that. None of the information provided by the government to the AP suggested the actual phone conversations were monitored.

Among those whose phone numbers were obtained were five reporters and an editor who were involved in the May 7, 2012 story.

The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media and has brought six cases against people suspected of leaking classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined.

Justice Department published rules require that subpoenas of records from news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general but it was not known if that happened in this case. The letter notifying AP that its phone records had been obtained though subpoenas was sent Friday by Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney in Washington.

Spokesmen in Machen's office and at the Justice Department had no immediate comment on Monday.

The Justice Department lays out strict rules for efforts to get phone records from news organizations. A subpoena can only be considered after "all reasonable attempts" have been made to get the same information from other sources, the rules say. It was unclear what other steps, in total, the Justice Department has taken to get information in the case.

A subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period," according to the rules.

The reason for these constraints, the department says, is to avoid actions that "might impair the news gathering function" because the government recognizes that "freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news."

News organizations normally are notified in advance that the government wants phone records and enter into negotiations over the desired information. In this case, however, the government, in its letter to the AP, cited an exemption to those rules that holds that prior notification can be waived if such notice, in the exemption's wording, might "pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation."

It is unknown whether a judge or a grand jury signed off on the subpoenas.

The May 7, 2012, AP story that disclosed details of the CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot occurred around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.

The plot was significant because the White House had told the public it had "no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the (May 2) anniversary of bin Laden's death."

The AP delayed reporting the story at the request of government officials who said it would jeopardize national security. Once government officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP disclosed the plot because officials said it no longer endangered national security. The Obama administration, however, continued to request that the story be held until the administration could make an official announcement.

The May 7 story was written by reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman with contributions from reporters Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan and Alan Fram. They and their editor, Ted Bridis, were among the journalists whose April-May 2012 phone records were seized by the government.

Brennan talked about the AP story and leaks investigation in written testimony to the Senate. "The irresponsible and damaging leak of classified information was made ... when someone informed the Associated Press that the U.S. Government had intercepted an IED (improvised explosive device) that was supposed to be used in an attack and that the U.S. Government currently had that IED in its possession and was analyzing it," he said.

He also defended the White House's plan to discuss the plot immediately afterward. "Once someone leaked information about interdiction of the IED and that the IED was actually in our possession, it was imperative to inform the American people consistent with Government policy that there was never any danger to the American people associated with this al-Qa'ida plot," Brennan told senators.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Two good reasons why you should take the 5th and refuse to answer all police questions!!!!

Remember the police are experts at questioning people and do it day in and day out, and become experts at manipulating people. Many of the questions the police ask are rigged and any answer you give will be an admission of guilt, which can be used to arrest you.

Susan Sanchez who is a Maricopa County public defender told us about how the cops rig the questions they ask people suspected of drunk driving at the "Know your rights forums" she used to give for Phoenix Copwatch.

The cops ask people how drunk they are on a scale of one to ten. A person who has only had one beer or drink will answer "one".

And of course that is admitting you are legally drunk because under Arizona law ANY amount of liquor which impairs your driving ability is considered to make you guilty of the crime of DUI.

Of course the only way to answer the question is to say an answer that officer friendly doesn't give you when he asks the question, which is the answer of ZERO.

Remember the cop doesn't ask you how drunk you are on a scale of zero to 10, he asks how drunk you are on a scale of 1 to ten, because if you give him the answer he asked for that is all it takes for him to tell a jury you admitted to driving drunk.

Of course this all sounds like bullsh*t and it is bullsh*t, but when a jury hears the cop say that you admitted to being drunk when he questioned you, that will almost certainly cause the jury to convict you. And even if it doesn't it is going to cause your lawyer to do a lot of work to undo the damage you cause by telling the cop you were drunk.

So remember just say NO to any and all police questioning.

Last but not least, I wouldn't put it past the TSA thugs to have framed this guy by ripping out a page of his passport to use as a lame excuse to arrest the guy.

Source

Saudi traveler with pressure cooker arrested at Detroit airport

By Tresa Baldas Detroit Free Press Mon May 13, 2013 12:48 PM

DETROIT -- Federal agents arrested a suspicious traveler with an altered Saudi Arabian passport at Detroit Metro Airport over the weekend after discovering a pressure cooker in his luggage.

According to a criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court, the passenger, Hussain Al Khawahir arrived Friday at the Detroit airport from Saudi Arabia via Amersterdam. He had a visa and a Saudi Arabian passport and told officers in the baggage control area that he would be visiting his nephew at the University of Toledo, the complaint said.

In the baggage area, two customs officers interviewed the passenger and noticed a page had been removed from the man’s passport, the complaint said.

The man said he did not know how the page was removed and stated that the passport was locked in a box that only he, his wife and three minor children had access to in his home, the complaint said. His hometown was not listed in court documents.

While at the airport, customs and border officials also examined his luggage and found a pressure cooker inside. When questioned about it, the man initially said that he brought the pressure cooker for his nephew because pressure cookers are not sold in Saudi Arabia, the complaint said. The man then changed his story and admitted his nephew had purchased a pressure cooker in America before, but it “was cheap” and broke after the first use.

Pressure cookers were used in last month’s Boston marathon bombings.

Then a U.S. Customs and Border Protection enforcement officer read Khawahir his Miranda rights.

The man acknowledged that he understood those rights, both verbally and in writing at 4:25 p.m. Friday. A minute later, he invoked his right to remain silent, the complaint said.

On Monday afternoon, Kawahir was in federal court in Detroit, making his initial appearance on charges that he knowingly used an altered Saudi Arabian passport with missing pages, and made a materially false statement to a customs officer about the pressure cooker in his possession, all to gain entry into the United States.

Customs and Border Protection officials and the FBI declined comment.

On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian student turned al Qaida operative, tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner by concealing a bomb in his underwear. The bomb fizzled, a flight attendant put out the flames and passengers subdued him. He was sentenced Feb. 16, 2012, in U.S. District Court in Detroit to multiple life sentences.

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