Homeless in Arizona

George W. Bush - The tyrant that invaded Iraq and Afghanistan

N. Korea ready to nuke the United States????

"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."

U.S. to beef up missile defense against N. Korea

Associated Press Fri Mar 15, 2013 12:54 PM

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon announced Friday it will spend $1 billion to add 14 interceptors to a West Coast-based missile defense system, responding to what it called faster-than-anticipated North Korean progress on nuclear weapons and missiles.

In announcing the decision, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he is determined to ensure protection of the U.S. homeland and stay ahead of the North Korean missile threat. He acknowledged that the interceptors already in place to defend against potential North Korean missile launches have had poor test performances.

“We will strengthen our homeland defense, maintain our commitment to our allies and partners, and make clear to the world that the United States stands firm against aggression,” Hagel told a Pentagon news conference.

The Pentagon intends to add the 14 interceptors to 26 already in place at Fort Greely, Alaska. That will expand the system’s ability to shoot down long-range missiles in flight before they could reach U.S. territory. In addition to those at Greely, the U.S. also has four missile interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

Hagel said the 14 extras should be in place by September 2017 but will not be deployed until they have been adequately tested.

James Miller, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said the project would cost about $1 billion.

Miller and Hagel said the U.S. will conduct environmental studies on three additional potential locations for interceptors in the United States, including on the East Coast, as required by Congress. Hagel said no decision on a particular site has been made, but the studies would shorten the timeline should a decision be made.

Miller said that would provide options for building an interceptor base on the East Coast or adding more interceptors in Alaska, should either approach become necessary due to further future increases in the threat from Iran and North Korea.

The threat of a missile strike from North Korea was the rationale for building the missile defense sites in Alaska and California during the administration of President George W. Bush. Technical difficulties with the interceptors slowed the pace at which they were installed at Greely and Vandenberg.

“Our policy is to stay ahead of the threat — and to continue to ensure that we are ahead of any potential future Iranian or North Korean ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capability,” Miller said in a speech Tuesday at the Atlantic Council.

Miller noted that last December, North Korea launched a satellite into space, demonstrating its mastery of some of the same technologies required for development of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

“Our concern about Pyongyang’s potential ICBM capability is compounded by the regime’s focus on developing nuclear weapons,” he said. “North Korea’s third nuclear test last month is obviously a serious concern for all nations.”

North Korea recently threatened to reduce Seoul to a “sea of fire” and stage pre-emptive nuclear attacks on Washington.

“North Korea’s shrill public pronouncements underscore the need for the U.S. to continue to take prudent steps to defeat any future North Korean ICBM,” Miller said in his speech Tuesday.

A facade shields Obama

A facade shields Obama

Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:34 PM

During my working career, I sometimes conferred with consultants in an effort to solve building-construction problems. On occasion, I interviewed people who pronounced that they could solve all the problems that I faced.

These consultants could talk very well, but in reality, they provided very few good solutions.

The one constant that some of these consultants had was a way with words, a golden tongue, so to speak. I am constantly reminded of this type of person whenever I hear President Barack Obama speak. He talks a good game but doesn’t produce anything worthwhile.

His everyday solution to our country’s problems is to spend more money. Hell, anybody can do that. That’s a crutch, not a solution.

President Obama has a facade. He speaks extremely well, but his intelligence leaves a lot to be desired.

Unfortunately, he has pulled the wool over many Americans’ eyes much as many consultants have attempted to do to me in my business career.

— R. “Dick” Gira
Sun City West

Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'

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Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'

By David G. Savage

March 15, 2013, 10:22 a.m.

WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court said Friday that it will no longer accept the “fiction” from the Obama administration’s lawyers that the CIA has no interest or documents that describe drone strikes.

“It is neither logical nor plausible for the CIA to maintain that it would reveal anything not already in the public domain to say the Agency at least has an intelligence interest in such strikes,” said Chief Judge Merrick Garland. “The defendant is, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The decision gave a partial victory to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks documents on the government’s still-secret policy on drone strikes. The three judges did not say any particular documents must be released, but they rejected the administration’s position that it could simply refuse to “confirm or deny” that it had any such documents.

A federal judge had rejected the ACLU’s suit entirely, but the three-judge appeals court revived the suit. The agency’s non-response does not pass the “straight face” test, Garland concluded.

He cited public statements from President Obama, new CIA Director John Brennan and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that discussed the use of drone strikes abroad. In the past, the courts have sometimes allowed government agencies in sensitive cases to refuse to say whether they have certain documents in their files.

“In this case, the CIA has asked the courts to stretch that doctrine too far — to give their imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible,” Garland wrote in ACLU vs. CIA.

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer called the decision a victory. “It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA’s interest in targeted killing is a secret,” he said. “It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding and on what grounds it is withholding them.

“We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the drones program,” said Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the ACLU.

david.savage@latimes.com

Justice Department wins the Rosemary Award - Again

The Rosemary Award, a distinction given by the National Security Archive annually to a public agency whose performance on transparency and openness is downright dismal.

The Rosemary Award is named after Rose Mary Woods, secretary to President Richard Nixon. Woods who famously erased a crucial 18 minutes of White House tapes.

Source

Posted at 08:00 AM ET, 03/15/2013

Justice Department ‘wins’ award for secrecy

By Emily Heil

In the category of dubious achievements, the Justice Department is now a back-to-back winner of the Rosemary Award, a distinction given by the National Security Archive annually to a public agency whose performance on transparency and openness is downright dismal.

Congrats, or something to the Justice Department (as our colleagues at The Fix say to the winners of their Worst Week in Washington)!

To merit the eighth-annual award, Justice obstructed and cloaked its doings in secrecy, the Archive says, much like the award’s namesake, Rose Mary Woods, secretary to President Richard Nixon. Woods famously erased a crucial 18 minutes of White House tapes (an innocent mistake, she claimed, that accidentally happened when she stretched to answer a phone call).

Justice “clinched the intensely competitive award “ just this week with its performance at a Senate hearing in which an official refused to answer questions about litigation that could undermine an open-government law Congress adopted in 2007 to speed up requests from the public filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

And Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy might have tipped the scales in the Rosemary sweepstakes when got in this zing chiding Justice for slow-walking its rewrite of its own FOIA policies to comply with the 2007 law:

“It’s been five years since we changed the law,” Leahy said. “It took me less time to get through law school.”

The Iraq war will cost $6 trillion????

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Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have been done?

By David Lazarus

March 18, 2013, 10:36 a.m.

In case you were wondering, the price tag for the war in Iraq could eventually top $6 trillion.

Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion, occupation and slugfest of Iraq, which, lest we forget, was begun in the name of protecting us from weapons of mass destruction that never existed.

A study by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies finds that the war has cost $1.7 trillion so far, with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans.

Those costs could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next 40 years, the report concluded.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number. Factoring in security forces, insurgents, journalists and aid workers, the death toll rises to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000.

As taxpayers, we're all on the hook for that estimated $6-trillion tab. That's nearly half the current national debt.

We spent about $550 billion on Medicare last year. Six trillion bucks would fund our healthcare coverage for seniors and disabled people for roughly a decade.

Federal spending for Medicaid, the healthcare program for low-income people, ran about $250 billion last year. So $6 trillion represents nearly 20 years of funding.

The federal government spends an estimated $524 billion on public elementary and secondary school systems annually. With $6 trillion, you're looking at a massive infusion of cash into our cash-strapped schools over a number of years.

The Environmental Protection Agency had a budget of about $9 billion last year. With $6 trillion, you could run the agency that protects Mother Earth for more than 600 years.

This is all just idle speculation, of course. The money's gone -- or will be as future war-related expenses eat it up.

It sure is something, though, to think about the good that could have been done if we'd decided to use that cash for purposes other than to pound the stuffing out of a country that posed no actual threat to us and had no true intention of doing us harm.

TSA goons force Marine to remove artificial legs at Sky Harbor checkpoint

Marine ordered to remove artificial legs at Sky Harbor checkpoint

By Sean Holstege The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Mar 19, 2013 2:26 PM

A wounded Marine on active duty was ordered to remove his artificial legs at Sky Harbor International Airport security checkpoint last week, according to a letter by a California congressman demanding an explanation from the Transportation Security Administration.

"The Marine, whose prosthetics were exposed, was humiliated, according to accounts," Rep. Duncan Hunter wrote TSA Administrator John Pistole.

The soldier was in a wheelchair carrying his military identification.

He was directed to two different screening stations, ordered to remove his prosthetics and at one point stand up for secondary inspection. Other TSA agents sat and watched as he tried to stand painfully and as his wheelchair was checked for explosives, Duncan wrote Monday.

Those accounts came from a man accompanying five San Diego area Marines to a Spring Training games as part of a volunteer effort to help wounded veterans with their recovery, Duncan’s spokesman Joe Kasper said. None of the Marines, who were not in uniform at the time, have spoken about the incident, he added.

Neither TSA nor Sky Harbor officials had any information about the incident, which reportedly occurred mid-day last Wednesday.

"There’s not much to say. Right now it’s a letter from a congressman," TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said, unable to confirm what happened. "We’ve not seen the letter."

In it Duncan demanded TSA’s procedures for such circumstances.

Melendez said those protocols are posted on the TSA’s website. _ ( www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/wounded-warrior-accommodations ) – which advises wounded veterans to contact the agency before travelling.

“Passengers with prostheses can be screened without removing them,” the TSA says on another passenger advisory on its website.

“Passengers in wheelchairs who can neither stand nor walk will be screened by a thorough pat-down while they remain seated,” the TSA tells passengers.

Since word of the Sky Harbor incident broke, Duncan’s office has received dozens of calls of support and more complaints of similar treatment by TSA.

“He’s not the first and he won’t be the last,” Kasper said.

One soldier had to remove his pants. Another double amputee faced repeated harassment, Kasper said.

“Those comments are built on a reputation TSA has built for itself. It’s not just about Marines, it’s anybody with a disability,” he added

Was the war worth it?

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Posted on March 19, 2013 10:54 am by EJ Montini

Was the war worth it?

It’s strangely quiet.

Should it be? Shouldn’t there at least be a discussion, an argument, something that answers the question: Was it worth it?

There are no official commemorations planned in Washington, D.C. None in Baghdad, either. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama issued a two-paragraph press release on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Iraq.

Here it is in its entirety:

“As we mark the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Michelle and I join our fellow Americans in paying tribute to all who served and sacrificed in one of our nation’s longest wars. We salute the courage and resolve of more than 1.5 million service members and civilians who during multiple tours wrote one of the most extraordinary chapters in military service. We honor the memory of the nearly 4,500 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice to give the Iraqi people an opportunity to forge their own future after many years of hardship. And we express our gratitude to our extraordinary military families who sacrificed on the home front, especially our Gold Star families who remain in our prayers.

“The last of our troops left Iraq with their heads held high in 2011, and the United States continues to work with our Iraqi partners to advance our shared interest in security and peace. Here at home, our obligations to those who served endure. We must ensure that the more than 30,000 Americans wounded in Iraq receive the care and benefits they deserve and that we continue to improve treatment for traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. With a strong Post 9/11 GI Bill, we must help our newest veterans pursue their education and find jobs worthy of their incredible talents. And all Americans can continue to support and honor our military families who are pillars of so many of our communities. On this solemn anniversary, we draw strength and inspiration from these American patriots who exemplify the values of courage, selflessness and teamwork that define our Armed Forces and keep our nation great.”

It’s good to honor the dead and to take care of the wounded. It’s important to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who risked so much, lost so much.

Nearly 4,500 Americans were killed and more than 30,000 wounded.

And so many more thousands of Iraqis.

News reports said that bombings on Tuesday’s anniversary killed nearly 60 people in Baghdad and injured 221 others.

Which leaves us with a question we don’t really seem willing, or able, to answer.

Was it all worth it?

In Sunday’s New York Times former Times reporter Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, an Iraqi, wrote in part, “We thought the trauma of war would be over when Hussein was deposed in 2003, but it extends past the execution of a thug. Ten years ago, I called the Iraq war the right war, but now, I cannot say that such a thing exists.”

That’s not an unusual sentiment.

Following World War II the great journalist and author John Hersey wrote a New Yorker magazine article that became a book called “Hiroshima.” It describes what happened to six people who were in the Japanese city when the atomic bomb was dropped.

At the end of Hersey’s book, one of the survivors, a German priest named Wilhelm Kleinsorge says, “The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

Based on what has occurred in the world since 1945 I’d say … never.

The Iraq war was a dismal failure!!!

Posted on March 19, 2013 5:02 pm by Robert Robb

The real Iraq war lesson

Except in a few neoconservative hideouts, the Iraq war is generally regarded as a mistake.

The war has cost over $800 billion so far, with more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers killed and around 32,000 wounded. Hard to argue that the United States has acquired security gains commensurate with that sacrifice.

So, why was the Iraq war a mistake and what lessons should be learned from it? The 10th anniversary of the initial invasion has occasioned considerable discussion of those questions. But most of the discussion is wide of the most important lesson to be learned.

The Iraq war was a mistake not because the Bush administration lied about the intelligence or because the press wasn’t skeptical enough about the claims being made about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq war wasn’t a mistake because there was inadequate planning for postwar reconstruction or insufficient military commitment and engagement by the U.S. after Saddam fell.

Certainly, it is fair to say that every important assumption the Bush administration made about the Iraq war turned out to be inaccurate.

Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction or an active program to produce them. The Bush administration assumed that it could just lop off the Baath leadership in Iraq and the civil government and society would continue to operate reasonably well. Instead chaos ensued and order and sound governance are still highly tenuous. Oil revenues haven’t paid for but a fraction of the cost of reconstruction, which remains patchy at best.

But here is the most important thing the Bush administration got wrong. The Bush administration claimed that, postwar, Iraq would become a shining example of democratic capitalism, serving to transform the region and be a U.S. ally helping to check the influence of Iran.

According to Transparency International, Iraq is the eighth most corrupt country in the world in which to do business. Its government remains largely paralyzed from sectarian and ethnic conflict. And it has no interest in being America’s front line against Iran. In fact, it wants friendly relations with Iran.

After Saddam’s minority Sunni dominance was wiped away, political power naturally flowed to the majority Shia. And the Shia naturally want cordial relations and an alliance with their co-religionists in Iran, given the hostile Sunni neighborhood in which they reside.

What’s important is that, while this in retrospect seems foreseeable, it was not foreseen. The Bush administration didn’t anticipate it. It wasn’t a major point made by critics of the decision to go to war.

The major lesson of the Iraq war is this: The United States cannot foresee the consequences of our actions with sufficient accuracy to be attempting to micromanage the geopolitics of the Middle East.

This is not a deficiency peculiar to the Bush administration or Republicans. President Barack Obama’s Muslim charm offensive was a dud. The Arab Spring caught his administration off guard and flat-footed.

Nor is it recent. President Clinton pushed prematurely for an Israeli-Palestinian comprehensive peace agreement and helped trigger the Second Intifada. George W. Bush told Palestinians they had to elect new leadership, so they choose Hamas.

Sometimes the time fuse on our unintended consequences is long. In 1953, the U.S. helped depose a democratically elected government in Iran and install an autocrat, the Shah, to run the country. That meant that, when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the revolution was reflexively anti-American. And now the anti-American ruling elite that took over wants a nuke.

The United States favored Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, then went to war against him twice.

It’s often said that the United States has no option but to be deeply engaged in the region’s geopolitics. Certainly that’s where the international terrorism that threatens us emanates. But effective counterterrorism can be selective and targeted. And Middle East oil, the other rationale usually cited, is far more important to Europe than the United States, particularly if we more aggressively developed domestic sources.

The larger U.S. role in attempting to micromanage the region’s geopolitics only even arguably makes sense if we can confidently intervene in ways that are productive rather than destructive. There’s a 60-year history that says we can’t, Iraq being just the most costly example.

Iraq Attacks Across Baghdad Kill 65, Wound Hundreds

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Iraq Attacks Across Baghdad Kill 65, Wound Hundreds

By ADAM SCHRECK 03/19/13 10:02 PM ET EDT AP

BAGHDAD — Insurgents sent a bloody message on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, carrying out a wave of bombings across the country Tuesday that killed at least 65 people in the deadliest day in Iraq this year.

The nearly 20 attacks, most of them in and around Baghdad, demonstrated in stark terms how dangerously divided Iraq remains more than a year after American troops withdrew. More than 240 people were reported wounded.

It was Iraq's bloodiest day since Sept. 9, when an onslaught of bombings and shootings killed 92.

Violence has ebbed sharply since the peak of Sunni-Shiite fighting that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006 and 2007. But insurgents are still able to stage high-profile attacks, while sectarian and ethnic rivalries continue to tear at the fabric of national unity.

The symbolism of Tuesday's attacks was strong, coming 10 years to the day, Washington time, that President George W. Bush announced the start of hostilities against Iraq. It was already early March 20, 2003, in Iraq when the airstrikes began.

The military action quickly ousted Saddam Hussein but led to years of bloodshed as Sunni and Shiite militants battled U.S. forces and each other, leaving nearly 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis dead.

A decade later, Iraq's long-term stability and the strength of its democracy are uncertain. While the country is freer than it was during Saddam's murderous rule, its Shiite-led government is arguably closer to Tehran than to Washington. It faces an outpouring of anger by the Sunni minority that was dominant under Saddam and at the heart of the insurgency that followed his ouster.

"Today's attacks are new proof that the politicians and security officials are a huge failure," said Hussein Abdul-Khaliq, a resident of Baghdad's Shiite slum district of Sadr City, which was hit by three explosions that killed 10 people, including three commuters on a minibus.

The apparently coordinated attacks around the country included car bombs and explosives stuck to the underside of vehicles. They targeted government security forces and mainly Shiite areas.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Iraqi officials believe al-Qaida's Iraq arm is to blame. The terror group favors car bombs and coordinated bombings to undermine public confidence in the government. It has claimed it was behind two large-scale, well-coordinated attacks already this month, including an assault on the Justice Ministry in downtown Baghdad last week that left 30 dead.

Sabah al-Nuaman, a spokesman for Iraq's counterterrorism services, said al-Qaida is trying to exploit political instability in the country. He also linked the violence to the civil war across the border in Syria, where largely Sunni rebels – some with ties to al-Qaida – are trying to topple President Bashar Assad.

"The terrorist groups are trying to move their operations back to Iraq. They want to make Iraq part of the regional struggle," al-Nuaman said.

The violence started around 8 a.m., when a bomb exploded outside a popular restaurant in Baghdad's Mashtal neighborhood, killing four people, according to police and hospital officials. It blew out the eatery's windows and left several cars mangled in the blood-streaked street.

The deadliest attack was a 10 a.m. car bombing near the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Baghdad's Qahira neighborhood. Seven people were killed.

Another car bomb exploded outside a restaurant near one of the main gates to the fortified Green Zone, which houses major government offices and the U.S. and British embassies. Six people died, including two soldiers. Thick black smoke could be seen rising from the area as ambulances raced to the scene.

At one point amid the chaos, authorities shut bridges spanning the Tigris River in the capital, hoping to thwart further attacks.

Car bombings, roadside blasts, suicide attacks and other mayhem were reported in other parts of the capital as well as in Taji, Tarmiyah, Baqouba and Iskandiriya. In the northern city of Mosul, a local police commander was killed along with two bodyguards by a suicide bomber.

The U.S. and Britain, the two countries that contributed the bulk of the troops for the 2003 war effort, condemned the attacks.

"The vast majority of Iraqis want to leave behind the violence of the past to build a peaceful and prosperous country," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement.

Amid the political tensions, Iraq's Cabinet decided Tuesday to postpone next month's local elections in two provinces dominated by Sunnis.

Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr blasted the decision and threatened to withdraw his bloc's support from the government.

"Staying in this government has become harmful and not useful at all," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub, Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad and Raphael Satter in London contributed to this report.

___

Follow Adam Schreck on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamschreck

US pays Iraq, Afghan vets $12 billion a year????

AP: Costs of US wars linger for over 100 years

By By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.

"When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII-veteran father's disability benefits helped feed their family.

Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack Obama's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need the money they are receiving.

"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.

With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of disability payments are set to rise much higher.

The AP identified the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of millions of federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

To gauge the post-war costs of each conflict, AP looked at four compensation programs that identify recipients by war: disabled veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or from a service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65 or disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their disabled children.

—The Iraq wars and Afghanistan

So far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict in the early 1990s are costing about $12 billion a year to compensate those who have left military service or family members of those who have died.

Those post-service compensation costs have totaled more than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical care and other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow for many years to come.

The new veterans are filing for disabilities at historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking compensation for injuries. Many are seeking compensation for a variety of ailments at once.

Experts see a variety of factors driving that surge, including a bad economy that's led more jobless veterans to seek the financial benefits they've earned, troops who survive wounds of war and more awareness about head trauma and mental health.

—Vietnam War

It's been 40 years since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.

Now above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly twice the size of the FBI's annual budget. And while many disabled Vietnam vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war to have large costs even after veterans die.

Based on an uncertain link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam, federal officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that qualifies for cash compensation — and it is now the most compensated ailment for Vietnam vets.

The VA also recently included heart disease among the Vietnam medical issues that qualify, and the agency is seeing thousands of new claims for that issue. Simpson said he has a lot of concerns about the government agreeing to automatically compensate for those diseases.

"That has been terribly abused," Simpson said.

Since heart disease is common among older Americans and is the nation's leading cause of death, the future deaths of thousands of Vietnam veterans could be linked to their service and their benefits passed along to survivors.

A congressional analysis estimated the cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the post-war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some $270 billion since 1970, according to AP calculations.

—World War I, World War II and the Korean War

World War I, which ended 94 years ago, continues to cost taxpayers about $20 million every year. World War II? $5 billion.

Compensation for WWII veterans and families didn't peak until 1991 — 46 years after the war ended — and annual costs since then have only declined by about 25 percent. Korean War costs appear to be leveling off at about $2.8 billion per year.

Of the 2,289 survivors drawing cash linked to WWI, about one-third are spouses and dozens of them are over 100 years in age.

Some of the other recipients are curious: Forty-seven of the spouses are under the age of 80, meaning they weren't born until years after the war ended. Many of those women were in their 20s and 30s when their aging spouses died in the 1960s and 1970s, and they've been drawing the monthly payments since.

—Civil War and Spanish-American War

There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee— each for $876 per year.

Surviving spouses can qualify for lifetime benefits when troops from current wars have a service-linked death. Children under the age of 18 can also qualify, and those benefits are extended for a lifetime if the person is permanently incapable of self-support due to a disability before the age of 18.

Citing privacy, officials did not disclose the names of the two children getting the Civil War benefits.

Their ages suggest the one in Tennessee was born around 1920 and the North Carolina survivor was born around 1930. A veteran who was young during the Civil War would likely have been roughly 70 or 80 years old when the two people were born.

That's not unheard of. At age 86, Juanita Tudor Lowrey is the daughter of a Civil War veteran. Her father, Hugh Tudor, fought in the Union army. After his first wife died, Tudor was 73 when he remarried her 33-year-old mother in 1920. Lowrey was born in 1926.

Lowrey, who lives in Kearney, Mo., suspects the marriage might have been one of convenience, with her father looking for a housekeeper and her mother looking for some security. He died a couple years after she was born, and Lowrey received pension benefits until she was 18.

Now, Lowrey said, she usually gets skepticism from people after she tells them she's a daughter of a Civil War veteran.

"We're few and far between," Lowrey said.

AP Writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/HiPpEV

U.S. still making payments to relatives of Civil War veterans

U.S. still making payments to relatives of Civil War veterans

By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow

Juanita Tudor Lowrey received government benefits tied to her father, a Civil War veteran. (Charlie Riedel/AP)Ten years after the launch of the Iraq War, a number of critics and analysts have been pointing to war’s extravagant financial cost—to say nothing of its toll on human lives. But a surprising report shows that nearly 150 years after the Civil War's conclusion, the U.S. government is still paying relatives of veterans.

An analysis from the Associated Press found that more than $40 billion annually is being spent on veterans and survivors of wars dating from the Spanish-American War of 1898 up through the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

There are only two recipients of Civil War benefits, both children of veterans and receiving $876 per year.

Although their names are being kept private, the AP estimates that they were both born between 1920 and 1930, meaning their parents were themselves upward of 80 when their children were born.

Juanita Tudor Lowrey, 86, received Civil War benefits tied to her late father from the age of 2 until her 18th birthday.

Military veteran and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson said the government should consider means testing veterans as the burden on the federal debt continues to grow.

"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson told the AP.

Simpson co-chaired President Barack Obama’s deficit reduction committee in 2010, which offered a number of recommendations for reducing the federal budget defecit.

And while it would be natural to assume the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the most costly, the payments to Vietnam War veterans nearly double the cost of our two current wars, $22 billion and $12 billion, respectively.

Simpson said a number of new ailments added to veterans coverage, including heart disease, has been driving up costs.

"That has been terribly abused," he said.

Meanwhile, World War II still costs the federal government about $5 billion a year. And the Korean War still costs taxpayers about $2.8 billion annually.

Amazingly, $20 million is still being paid each year to 2,289 family members of veterans from World War I, many of whom are over 100. But perhaps even stranger, 47 benefit recipients were not even born until after the war ended.

What America Learned in Iraq

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What America Learned in Iraq

By JOHN A. NAGL

Published: March 19, 2013

THE costs of the second Iraq war, which began 10 years ago this week, are staggering: nearly 4,500 Americans killed and more than 30,000 wounded, many grievously; tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis wounded or killed; more than $2 trillion in direct government expenditures; and the significant weakening of the major regional counterweight to Iran and consequent strengthening of that country’s position and ambitions. Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and completely in their face.

It may seem folly to seek a silver lining among these thunderclouds. But there are three flickers of light that offer some hope that the enormous price was not paid entirely in vain. These coins offer a meager return on our enormous investment, but not collecting them would be an insult to the memory of all that we have lost.

The first lesson is for America’s politicians, from both parties, who pushed our country into a war that we did not need to fight for dubious reasons that were eventually proved false.

Iraq was not, as we were repeatedly told, developing weapons of mass destruction; even if it had been, there was no reason deterrence, which prevented war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, could not have worked against a nuclear Iraq. There was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and no Qaeda presence in Iraq until the American invasion, which caused social order to collapse and provided the terrorist group with a powerful recruiting message and a dangerous new base from which to attack.

The invasion of Iraq and its bitter aftermath should remind politicians for generations of the high cost and unpredictable results for those who roll what Otto von Bismarck called “the iron dice” and should forever discredit the notion of “preventive war.” The first Iraq war, in which I led a tank platoon, was necessary; this one was not.

Reluctance to send American ground troops to intervene in Libya and Syria, while providing different levels of political and military support, gives some hope that the country will think more than twice before fighting another unnecessary war. Good intentions do not always lead to favorable outcomes.

The second lesson is for the American military, justly proud of its renaissance after the debacle of Vietnam and subsequent triumph in the cold war but grievously unprepared for the wars of this century.

The British historian Michael Howard noted that it was impossible to perfectly prepare military forces for the next war; what is important is to make sure that you have not gotten the preparations so wrong that the military cannot quickly adapt when it is next needed.

The Department of Defense failed that test. It ignored preparations for counterinsurgency operations and neglected the need for a deep understanding of languages and cultures, which played a critical role in the Sunni Awakening that eventually changed the course of the Iraq conflict.

These are old lessons — they were in fact codified in the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual of 1940 and had to be painfully relearned over the past decade. They cannot be forgotten now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are finally drawing down. Recognizing that post-invasion stability operations, including counterinsurgency, are core military tasks for which the Pentagon must prepare is an important first step.

It would also be wise to make further investments in remotely piloted vehicles, Special Operations Forces and the capacity to train and advise foreign militaries, all of which will bear much of the burden of the most likely conflicts of this century. Of course, given the spending constraints now being imposed by Congress and the subsequent painful trade-offs those constraints bring, it remains to be seen whether these lessons have really been learned.

Finally, the experience of the Iraq war offers a breath of hope for the American people at large. In the wake of Vietnam, the United States began its grand experiment of an all-volunteer military. And it was most certainly an experiment: there was no expectation that the system would hold together in a major war, and for two generations young men have been required to register with the Selective Service in case general conflict erupted.

But there have been two such wars over the past decade, and the all-volunteer force has come through these crucibles of blood and fire with enormous distinction. [Sadly the only reason the Iraq war lasted so long was because of the all-volunteer force. Many experts think the draft, which is really a slave labor system was one of the things that caused the Vietnam war to end much earlier then it would have if the politicians had there way. Of course there was no draft in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and thus no anti-war protests from people who would be facing the draft]

Tempered by the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation of World War II fame helped defeat fascism on two continents and save civilization. As loudly as their contributions resound in history, two-thirds of them were drafted. This new greatest generation has fought longer if not harder than its grandparents did, and all have been volunteers.

My own tank task force lost 22 fine young men during the second Iraq war, including a West Point captain and five lieutenants, and earned well over 100 Purple Hearts. The nation owes such service members a depth of gratitude it can never fully repay.

But it can begin by ensuring that we care for those who have borne the battle, and for their spouses and their orphans, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, America’s greatest wartime president. The traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that are the signature wounds of these wars are invisible and hard to heal; as many as a fourth of those who fought in Iraq will suffer the ravages of these injuries for decades to come.

This is not a compelling list of gains when balanced against the unbearable losses America has endured in Iraq. But it would devalue the sacrifices of the many who have suffered if we were not to read these lessons written in blood, if our politicians did not approach future interventions with greater humility, if our military did not prepare for all possible wars rather than only the ones that it wants to fight.

We must hope that from such peril and toil this great young generation, tempered by war and hardened by what its members have seen and done, will build a better future for a wiser and chastened America.

John A. Nagl, a retired Army officer and a research professor at the United States Naval Academy, served in both Iraq wars and is the author of “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.”

Lindh lawyer to push for 5 daily group prayers

Lindh lawyer to push for 5 daily group prayers

Associated Press Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:59 AM

INDIANAPOLIS — A lawyer who helped American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh and other Muslim inmates win the right to hold daily group prayers in a high-security unit said he’ll ask a judge to order that they be allowed to pray together five times a day, as Islam requires.

Chris Burke, a Bureau of Federal Prisons spokesman, said that since March 12, inmates of all religions housed in the Terre Haute federal prison’s Communications Management Unit have been allowed to pray together three times per day.

American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana legal director Ken Falk, who represented Lindh in his lawsuit against the prison bureau, said U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson’s Jan. 11 ruling requires that the prison allow five daily group prayers.

“Basically, it’s our contention that they’re not complying with the court order,” Falk said Tuesday. “The judge’s order is pretty clear.”

A prison bulletin dated March 12 says only 10 inmates at a time can use the unit’s multi-purpose room for group prayer during the hours the room is open. It wasn’t clear how prison officials arrived at the limit of three prayers a day.

Those housed in Lindh’s unit are considered extreme security risks and their interactions are closely monitored. Until this month, inmates housed in the unit were only allowed to pray together once per week or during Ramadan or on other significant religious holidays. At other times, inmates had to pray alone in their cells and hope to hear each other through the walls.

Magnus-Stinson found the policy violated a 1993 law banning the government from curtailing religious speech without showing a compelling interest, and the government chose not to appeal her ruling.

Magnus-Stinson said in court documents that it was clear that 32-year-old Lindh sincerely believed that Islam mandates that Muslims pray together five times a day and federal law requires the prison to accommodate his beliefs — which praying simultaneously inside their cells did not do. She also noted that Muslim inmates in other federal prisons were allowed to hold daily group prayers.

“A central tenet of the Islamic faith is the obligation for adult Muslims to engage in five daily prayers, or Salat,” she wrote. “By prohibiting Mr. Lindh and the other Muslim prisoners who hold similar beliefs in the CMU from praying in each other’s presence, the Warden has denied Mr. Lindh and these other prisoners the religious exercise of daily group prayer,” she said elsewhere.

Prison officials said during the trial on Lindh’s lawsuit that allowing group prayers every day would pose a security risk and that inmates had used religion as cover for gang-like activity, but the judge dismissed those arguments as insubstantial.

The lawsuit was originally filed in 2009 by two Muslim inmates in the unit. Lindh joined the lawsuit in 2010, and the case has drawn far more attention because of his involvement. The other plaintiffs have dropped out as they were released from prison or transferred to other units.

In 2001, Lindh was captured in Afghanistan by U.S. troops and accused of fighting for the Taliban. Raised Catholic, the California native was 12 when he saw the movie “Malcolm X” and became interested in Islam. He converted to Islam at age 16. Walker told Newsweek after his capture that he had entered Afghanistan to help the Taliban build a “pure Islamic state.”

In 2002, Lindh pleaded guilty to supplying services to the now-defunct Taliban government and carrying explosives for them. He had been charged with conspiring to kill Americans and support terrorists, but those charges were dropped in a plea agreement. He was transferred to the Terre Haute prison in 2007. He is eligible for release in 2019.

Obama vows unwavering support for Israel

America, along with the European countries that colonized the Middle East pretty much stole the land from the native peoples and gave it to the Israelis.

And until those people get their land back there will never be peace in the Middle East.

Sadly America has always been part of the problem in the Middle East, not the solution to the problem.

Yes, I know, the Jews got screwed by the Nazis and Russians.

But the solution to that problem isn't to steal the land from the Palestine people and give it to the Jews.

If you ask me we should let the Jews come to America. Something that our government refused to do in the Hitler era.

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Obama vows unwavering support for Israel

By Julie Pace and Matthew Lee Associated Press Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:15 PM

JERUSALEM — Vowing eternal support for America’s top Mideast ally, U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday assured Israel of his personal commitment to its security and delivered a blunt warning to its foes that the United States has the Jewish state’s back.

Arriving in Israel on his first trip to the country as president, Obama told the Israeli people at an extravagant welcoming ceremony that “peace must come to the Holy Land” and that goal would not be achieved at Israel’s expense. U.S. backing for Israel will be a constant as the Middle East roils with revolution and Iran continues work on its nuclear program, he said.

“The United States is proud to stand with you as your strongest ally and your greatest friend,” Obama said, accepting profuse thanks from Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the tarmac at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport.

“Across this region the winds of change bring both promise and peril,” he said, calling his visit “an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds between our nations, to restate America’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, and to speak directly to the people of Israel and to your neighbors.”

Seeking to alter a perception among many Israelis that his government has been less supportive of Israel than previous U.S. administrations, Obama declared the U.S.-Israeli alliance “eternal.”

“It is forever,” he said to applause as Israeli and U.S. flags fluttered in a steady breeze under clear, sunny skies.

Even before leaving the airport for Jerusalem, Obama offered a vivid display of the U.S. commitment to Israeli security by visiting a missile battery that is part of Israel’s Iron Dome defense from militant rocket attacks. The United States has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the system with Israel.

Obama and Netanyahu toured the battery, brought to the airport for the occasion. They met and chatted with soldiers who operate the system that Israel credits with intercepting hundreds of rockets during a round of fighting against Gaza militants last November.

“Let me say as clearly as I can: The United States of America stands with the State of Israel because it is in our fundamental national security interest to stand with Israel,” Obama said.

“We stand together because peace must come to the Holy Land,” he added. “For even as we are clear-eyed about the difficulty, we will never lose sight of the vision of an Israel at peace with its neighbors.”

Speaking first at the ceremonial welcome, the nearly 90-year-old Peres offered Obama heartfelt thanks for American defense of Israel.

“A world without America’s leadership, without her moral voice, would be a darker world,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “A world without your friendship would invite aggression against Israel.”

Netanyahu, who sparred frequently with Obama over the course of the U.S. president’s first term, was equally lavish in his praise.

“Thank you for standing by Israel at this time of historic change in the Middle East,” he said. “Thank you for unequivocally affirming Israel’s sovereign right to defend itself by itself against any threat.”

Although preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon is a top priority of both Israel and the United States, Netanyahu and Obama have differed in the past on precisely how to achieve both ends.

Israel repeatedly has threatened to take military action should Iran appear to be on the verge of obtaining a bomb. The U.S. has pushed for more time to allow diplomacy and economic penalties to run their course, though Obama insists military action is an option.

Obama, who joked that he was “getting away from Congress” by visiting Israel, will meet privately Wednesday with both Peres and Netanyahu before visiting several cultural and religious sites aimed at showing his understanding of the deep and ancient connections between the Jewish people and the land that is now Israel.

He will also meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and travel to Jordan before returning home on Saturday.

But on an itinerary filled more with symbolism than substance, Obama’s main focus is on an Israel that is increasingly wary of developments in Syria and Iran. Adding yet another dimension to the trip, Obama landed amid new questions about the Syrian regime’s possible use of chemical weapons.

Obama has declared the use, deployment or transfer of the weapons would be a “red line” for possible military intervention by the U.S. in the Syrian conflict. Ahead of Obama’s visit, authorities in Israel said they believed that chemical weapons may have been recently used in Syria, although U.S. officials have said they had no evidence to support the Syrian regime’s claims that rebels were responsible for a chemical attack.

Even though U.S. officials have set expectations low and previewed no major policy pronouncements, a clear measure of the success of Obama’s Israel trip will be how much he is able to reverse negative perceptions.

The centerpiece of the visit will be a speech to Israeli university students on Thursday, during which Obama will again renew U.S. security pledges to Israel as it seeks to counter threats from Iran, protect its people from any spillover in the Syrian civil war and maintain its shaky peace accord with an Egypt that is now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama will make an almost perfunctory visit to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where he will meet the embattled Abbas and assure him that an independent Palestinian state remains a U.S. foreign policy and national security priority.

As Israelis warmly greeted Obama, Palestinians held several small protests in the West Bank and Gaza. Demonstrators in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip burned posters of Obama and U.S. flags, accusing the U.S. of being biased toward Israel.

In the West Bank, about 200 activists erected about a dozen tents in an area just outside of Jerusalem to draw attention to Israel’s policy of building settlements. The tents were pitched in E1, a strategically located area where Israel has said it plans on building thousands of homes. The U.S. has harshly criticized the plan.

Israeli forces have swiftly dismantled similar encampments built by Palestinians in the past. Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, one of the activists, said Israeli forces surrounded the tent camp but had not moved in.

Despite not coming with any new plan to get the stalled peace process back on track, Obama plans to make clear that his administration intends to keep trying to get talks re-launched.

Obama will close out his Mideast trip with a 24-hour stop in Jordan, an important U.S. ally, where his focus will be on the violence in Syria. More than 450,000 Syrians have fled to Jordan, crowding refugee camps and overwhelming aid organizations.

In his talks with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Obama also will try to shore up the country’s fledgling attempts to liberalize its government and stave off an Arab Spring-style movement similar to the ones that have taken down leaders elsewhere in the region.

The painful lessons of Iraq

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The painful lessons of Iraq

By David Ignatius, Published: March 20

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history. We’ll never know whether the story might have been different if better planning had been done for “the day after,” or the Iraqi army hadn’t been disbanded, or several other “ifs.” But the abiding truth is that America shouldn’t have rolled the dice this way on a war of choice.

As I think back to the crucible of 2003, two remarks made by Arab friends stand out particularly. One was from a Lebanese Shiite who supported the war, but on the condition that America was resolute enough to finish what it was starting. “If Rome is strong, the provinces are ready,” my friend said.

But Rome wasn’t strong enough to prevail. America’s military power, awesome as it was, turned out to be insufficient to impose a settlement in Iraq; and in a grinding war of occupation, all our might could not turn on the electricity in Baghdad or frighten Sunnis and Shiites into cooperating with each other. Rome was also weak at home, politically: The United States didn’t have the stomach for a protracted war that President George W. Bush couldn’t explain and the public didn’t understand.

The second comment was from a Syrian friend who opposed the war. In 2002, when we first discussed the coming battle, he was reading “The March of Folly,” historian Barbara Tuchman’s account of epochal policy blunders through history. America was about to make another mistake of historic dimensions, my friend warned.

My friend took me aside after the fighting had been raging for several months. I am still haunted by what he said: “I am sorry for America. You are stuck. You have become a country of the Middle East. America will never change Iraq, but Iraq will change America.”

What other lessons should America learn from Iraq? An obvious one is the danger of creating a political vacuum by overthrowing a dictator. The United States dreamed that it would modernize Iraq by toppling Saddam Hussein. But when we disbanded the nonsectarian army and most of the secular government, Iraqis had nowhere to turn but their most basic ethnic and tribal identities as Sunnis or Shiites, Kurds or Arabs.

Many in the CIA understood the need to keep the Iraqi army and civil service together. That’s part of why they clashed so sharply with Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and his Iraqi champion, Ahmed Chalabi, who wanted to dismantle the Baath Party, root and branch. I watched a tiny part of that battle play out one day in April 2003, in a bitter argument on the lawn of Chalabi’s headquarters at the Mansour Hunting Club in suburban Baghdad. The headline on the column I wrote about that was “Bush’s confusion, Baghdad’s mess.”

In the political vacuum we created, Iraq tumbled into the past — pulling a lot of the Arab world with it. That’s part of why President Obama has been so careful recently in dealing with Syria: He doesn’t want America to make the same mistake twice. But history is cruel: You can try so hard to avoid an outcome that, in your very passivity, you make more likely.

Another lesson is the importance of dignity in the Arab world. Most Iraqis despised Saddam because, in addition to torturing their sons and daughters, he had taken their dignity. But many came to loathe America, as well, because for all our talk of democracy, we damaged their sense of honor and independence. As the Arab world proves over and over, from Palestine to Benghazi, people who are penniless in terms of material possessions would rather die than lose their sense of honor to outsiders.

A final lesson is the benefit of persistence. Bush made a disastrous mistake invading Iraq in 2003. But having busted up the country, he tried his best to clean up the mess. By checking the spiraling sectarian killing, the surge of U.S. troops led by Bush and Gen. David Petraeus saved thousands of Iraqi lives. It’s one thing Americans did right in this painful story.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Obama’s Nixonian Precedent

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Obama’s Nixonian Precedent

By MARY L. DUDZIAK

Published: March 21, 2013 32 Comments

ON March 17, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, sending B-52 bombers over the border from South Vietnam. This episode, largely buried in history, resurfaced recently in an unexpected place: the Obama administration’s “white paper” justifying targeted killings of Americans suspected of involvement in terrorism.

President Obama is reportedly considering moving control of the drone program from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense Department, as questions about the program’s legality continue to be asked. But this shift would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself — not which entity secretly does the killing. Secrecy has been used to hide presidential overreach — as the Cambodia example shows.

On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page “white paper,” Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.

Since 1965, “the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations,” he told the New York City Bar Association. “It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia.”

In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So the Obama administration’s lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false.

To be sure, the administration may have additional arguments in support of its use of drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other countries. To secure the confirmation of John O. Brennan as the C.I.A. director, it recently showed members of the Congressional intelligence committees some of the highly classified legal memos that were the basis for the white paper. But Mr. Obama has asked us to trust him, and Cambodia offers us no reason to do so.

A more limited, secret bombing campaign in Cambodia had begun in 1965 during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, but Nixon escalated it to carpet-bombing. The aim was to disrupt Communist bases and supply routes. The New York Times reported on it two months after it began, but the White House denied it, and the trail went cold. When the bombing began, Nixon even kept it a secret from his secretary of state, William P. Rogers. Worried about leaks, Nixon told Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser: “State is to be notified only after the point of no return.”

The bombing campaign, called Operation Breakfast, was carried out through out-and-out deception. Sixty B-52 bombers were prepared for a bombing run over targets in Vietnam. After the usual pre-mission briefing, pilots and navigators of 48 planes were then pulled aside and informed that they would receive new coordinates from a radar installation in Vietnam. Their planes would be diverted to Cambodia. But the destination was kept secret even from some crew members. The historian Marilyn B. Young found an “elaborate system of double reporting,” such that “even the secret records of B-52 bombing targets were falsified so that nowhere was it recorded that the raids had ever taken place.”

So the sort of “scattered instances of returning fire across the border” cited by Mr. Stevenson were actually regular bombing runs by B-52’s. Over 14 months, nearly 4,000 flights dropped 103,921 tons of explosives, followed by more extensive bombing farther into Cambodia. Mr. Kissinger later claimed that he had been assured that there were no civilians in the area, which was not the case. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese response was to move farther into Cambodia. The bombers followed.

Eventually, select members of Congress were notified, and an effort by Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, to add the bombing to the Watergate articles of impeachment failed. Critics have argued that the ultimate result of Nixon’s strategy was to destabilize the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and enable the Khmer Rouge’s ascent to power in 1975, and the subsequent genocide.

The Cambodia bombing, far from providing a valuable precedent for today’s counterterrorism campaign, illustrates the trouble with secrecy: It doesn’t work. If Nixon had gone to Congress or announced the plan publicly, the historian Jeffrey P. Kimball has written, “there would have been an uproar.” But disclosure was ultimately forced upon him when he decided to send ground troops into Cambodia. A new wave of giant antiwar protests erupted, and Nixon’s ability to take further aggressive action became infeasible.

Barack Obama is, of course, no Richard Nixon — we expect better of him. And we deserve the transparency he promised us, not a new version of secret warfare.

Mary L. Dudziak, a professor of law and director of the Project on War and Security in Law, Culture and Society at Emory University, is the author of “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.”

Hitler joins gun debate, but history is in dispute

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Hitler joins gun debate, but history is in dispute

By Adam Geller Associated Press Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:26 AM

When the president of Ohio’s state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.

Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.

“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in Poland’s 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.

But comparisons between a push by gun control advocates in the U.S. and Hitler have become so common — in online comments and letters to newspaper editors, at gun rights protests and in public forums — they’re often asserted as fact, rather than argument.

“Absolute certainties are a rare thing in this life, but one I think can be collectively agreed upon is the undeniable fact that the Holocaust would have never taken place had the Jewish citizenry of Hitler’s Germany had the right to bear arms and defended themselves with those arms,” former Major League Baseball pitcher John Rocker wrote in an online column in January.

After some gun advocates rallied at New York’s capitol in February carrying signs depicting Gov. Andrew Cuomo as Hitler, National Rifle Association President David Keene said the analogy was appropriate.

“Folks that are cognizant of the history, not just in Germany but elsewhere, look back to that history and say we can’t let that sort of thing happen here,” Keene, who was the lead speaker at the rally, told a radio interviewer March 1.

Those comparisons between gun control now and under Hitler joined numerous other statements, including the one by the Ohio school board president, Debe Terhar, on her personal Facebook page in January and by conservative commentator Andrew Napolitano, writing in The Washington Times.

The comparisons recently prompted the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, to call on critics of gun control to keep Hitler and the Nazis out of the debate.

The rhetoric “is such an absurdity and so offensive and just undermines any real understanding of what the Holocaust was about,” said Ken Jacobson, the ADL’s deputy national director. “If they do believe it, they’re making no serious examination of what the Nazi regime was about.”

But some gun rights advocates firmly disagree.

“People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” said Charles Heller, executive director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which has long compared U.S. gun control to Nazi tactics. “I guess if you’re pro-Nazi, they are right. But if you’re pro-freedom, we call those people liars.”

Comparing gun control activism to Hitler is not new. In a 1994 book, “Guns, Crime and Freedom,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre wrote that “In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the Holocaust.”

But the history of civilian gun ownership under the Nazis, scholars say, is far more complicated than the rhetoric indicates.

After World War I, Germany signed a peace treaty requiring dismantling of much of its army and limiting weapons import and export. But many of the 1 million soldiers returning home joined armed militias, including a Nazi Party force that saw Communists as the leading threat.

“Technically, they (the militias) were illegal and the guns were illegal, but a lot of government officials didn’t care about right-wingers with guns taking on Communists,” said David Redles, co-author of “Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History,” a popular college text. By 1928, however, officials decided they had to get a handle on the militias and their weapons and passed a law requiring registration of all guns, said Redles, who teaches at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.

Soon after Hitler was named chancellor in 1933, he used the arson of the Reichstag as an excuse to push through a decree allowing for the arrest of many Communists and the suspension of civil rights including protections from search and seizure. But as the Nazis increasingly targeted Jews and others they considered enemies, they moved in 1938 to loosen gun statutes for the loyal majority, said Bernard Harcourt, a University of Chicago professor of law and political science who has studied gun regulations under Hitler.

The 1938 law is best known for barring Jews from owning weapons, after which the Nazis confiscated guns from Jewish homes. But Harcourt points out that Hitler’s gun law otherwise completely deregulated acquisition of rifles, long guns and ammunition. It exempted many groups from requiring permits. The law lowered the age for legal gun ownership from 20 to 18. And it extended the validity of gun permits from one year to three years.

“To suggest that the targeting of Jews in any of the gun regulations or any of the other regulations is somehow tied to Nazis’ view of guns is entirely misleading,” Harcourt said, “because the Nazis believed in a greater deregulation of firearms. Firearms were viewed, for the good German, were something to which they had rights.”

With the 1938 law, Nazis seized guns from Jewish homes. But few Jews owned guns and they composed just 2 percent of the population in a country that strongly backed Hitler. By the time the law passed, Jews were so marginalized and spread among so many cities, there was no possibility of them putting up meaningful resistance, even with guns, said Robert Gellately, a professor of history at Florida State University and author of “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany.” [Of course the Jews fighting a normal war against the Nazi's would have been impossible. But when minorities are oppressed, the never fight a normal war, but instead fight a guerrilla war and only choose to fight in battles they can win. That's what happened in the American Revolution when the Americans fought the British]

U.S. gun rights advocates disagree, pointing to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising by about 700 armed Jews who were able to fend off a much larger force of German troops for days until retreating to tunnels or fleeing. The Nazis won out by systematically burning the ghetto to the ground, house by house.

“Once the Germans began adopting that strategy there really wasn’t very much that people armed with pistols, or even rifles and machine guns, could do,” said Paulsson, the historian and author of “Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw.” [Again I disagree, in these situations the Jews would have chosen to fight a guerilla war and only picked to fight battles which they could win.]

Paulsson said it is possible that if Polish Jews had limited their resistance, Nazi troops might not have destroyed the ghetto, allowing more to survive in hiding or escape. When armed Jews shot at mobs or troops at other times in 1930s and 1940s Poland, it incited more vicious counter-attacks, he said.

But to Heller, the gun rights activist, the Warsaw uprising is proof of power in firearms. Giving Jews more guns might not have averted the Holocaust, but it would have given them a fighting chance, enough that perhaps a third of them could have shot their way out of being marched to the concentration camps, he said.

“Could they have fought back? They did (in Warsaw). You know why they (the Nazis) destroyed the ghetto? Because they were afraid of getting shot,” he said. “Now, will it get to that in the U.S.? God, I hope not. Not if (U.S. Attorney General Eric) Holder doesn’t start sending people to kick doors down.”

But Paulsson, whose mother was freed from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of the war, dismisses that argument as twisting the facts.

“Ideologues always try to shoehorn history into their own categories and read into the past things that serve their own particular purposes,” he said.

Honduras police operating death squads???

Despite millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Honduras aimed at professionalizing the country’s police ...

Police in Honduras accused of operating death squads

By Alberto Arce Associated Press Fri Mar 22, 2013 8:38 PM

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras The operation was quick and under the cover of night. Armed, masked men arrived in late-model SUVs, getting through the gate into the small neighborhood of humble homes. Without firing a shot, witnesses said, they took Kevin Samraid Carranza Padilla, 28, known in the gang world as “Teiker,” and his girlfriend, Cindy Yadira Garcia, 19.

The next morning, Jan. 10, Honduras’ major newspaper, El Heraldo, reported that police had captured Carranza, a leader of the 18th Street gang suspected in the shooting death of a police commander months earlier. It also published a photo of a shirtless, tattooed young man lying on the ground, his hands behind his back, his face partially wrapped in blue duct tape, the roll still attached. Carranza’s mother, Blanca Alvarado, recognized him from his tattoos.

The photo was distributed to media by a police prosecutor, according to three sources who didn’t want to be named for security reasons. Soon after, agents at the national criminal investigations office acknowledged that there was a detention order for Carranza, and he had been brought in.

More than two months later, Carranza and Yadira have disappeared, The Associated Press has found. They are not in police custody, there are no criminal proceedings against them, and police now say they know nothing about the case.

“At this point,” said Carranza’s mother, “one can only imagine that they are dead.”

At all levels

Police have long been accused of operating more like assassins than law enforcement officers in Honduras, but few cases ever have been investigated. In the past year, police were alleged to have been involved in the deaths of a prominent Honduran radio journalist and the son of a former police chief — but neither killing has been solved.

Despite millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Honduras aimed at professionalizing the country’s police, accusations persist.

In the past three years, the AP has learned, Honduran prosecutors have received as many as 150 formal complaints about death squad-style killings in the capital of Tegucigalpa, and at least 50 more in the economic hub of San Pedro Sula. The country’s National Autonomous University, citing police reports, has counted 149 civilians killed by police in the past two years, including 25 members of the 18th Street gang.

Even the country’s top police chief has been charged with being complicit.

In 2002, a police internal affairs report accused then-police prison inspector Juan Carlos Bonilla of three extrajudicial killings — and linked him to 11 more deaths and disappearances that it said were part of a police policy of “social cleansing.” He was tried and acquitted on one of the three charges. The head of internal affairs unit who produced the report, Maria Luisa Borjas, was expelled from the department, and the rest of the cases, like most crimes in Honduras, were not investigated.

Last year, Bonilla was chosen to lead the national police force despite unanswered questions about his past.

Surveillance video

AP interviews with family, witnesses and law enforcement officials paint a picture of a case in which two people associated with gangs were taken into police custody and then never heard from again.

After witnesses told Alvarado, 50, that her son had been taken by police, she went to a series of police stations in search of him.

At the National Criminal Investigations Office, she was met by 20 officers, some masked, who openly played with their guns as she asked after her son and his girlfriend.

“You can look for those dogs in the Tablon,” Alvarado said they told her, referring to a lot outside of the city where bodies of the executed are regularly dumped, their faces taped and hands and feet tied.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world.

The modus operandi in death squad-style killings does not vary much: masked men in bulletproof vests, traveling in large vehicles with tinted windows and no plates, roam the city in groups of 10, said an official in the Carranza investigation, who also could not be named because of the sensitivity of the case.

A month after Carranza’s disappearance, Honduran media released a surveillance video of a similar case: five young men walking a street at night were stopped and surrounded by masked gunmen with AK-47s who pulled up in a large SUV. The gunmen fired at three men who fled. The remaining two, their hands up in surrender, were made to lie face down on the pavement — and then shot several times in cold blood.

One died instantly. The other is seen still moving after three shots from an assault weapon. He later died at a hospital.

McClellan: Was Iraq worth it?

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McClellan: Was Iraq worth it?

Mike McClellan is a Gilbert resident and former English teacher at Dobson High School in Mesa.

Posted: Saturday, March 23, 2013 10:11 am

Guest Commentary by Mike McClellan | 19 comments

Ten years on, what do we have as a result of our involvement in Iraq?

A sort of democracy in that country. And no more Saddam.

But was it worth the toll on our country? And on that one?

Let’s be honest. In the lead up to the war, most of us supported the Bush Administration’s decision. [Not me! I didn't support Vietnam either!!!]

In the heated aftermath of 9/11, we wanted to strike back. Afghanistan then seemed a success, and we were told that Saddam had a massive cache of weapons of mass destruction. Plus, there were vague hints of Saddam’s involvement with Al Qaida.

So it’s unsurprising that we supported the invasion.

And at first glance, we had the easy victory folks like then-Vice President Dick Cheney predicted.

In fact, in a way, we won the war and lost the peace.

The invasion itself went almost in textbook fashion. Even Saddam seemed to cooperate, as no poisonous gasses or other kinds of weapons like that were loosed on our troops.

The Iraqi forces performed more like paper tigers than a fighting army. And soon enough, the massive statue of Saddam was toppled.

“Mission Accomplished.” The war won.

And soon enough, the peace lost.

Forget, for a moment, that we never did find those weapons of mass destruction. Despite what some might say, America wasn’t alone in believing Iraq had those.

Let’s focus on what happened after the initial battles. To call it incompetence would be to grossly understate what American officials did.

First, they made our brave men and women into a force of nation-builders, something they clearly weren’t trained for. So their efforts, while praiseworthy, often were misdirected.

Second, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush officials decided that we didn’t need a massive force in post-war Iraq, extending the troops who were there far too much.

Third, we failed to understand history, that somehow we felt the liberation of Iraq would lead to peace between the Sunnis and the Shia. As if centuries of conflict would be ended with the elimination of one grisly dictator.

Fourth, we decided to decimate what was left of the Iraqi army and police force. We removed top leaders and middle managers of both, effectively leaving that country lawless.

Which meant?

Chaos. And into the chaos came the very people who we feared were there (but who apparently were not), Al-Qaida.

That group, along with local insurgents, gave Iraq and American forces years of terror, IED’s and ambushes that led to thousands of deaths, both courageous Americans and innocent Iraqis.

This incompetence led to the surge, the dramatic and sustained troop increase proposed by Sen. McCain, one that, along with a different strategy in approaching every day Iraqis, led to a kind of peace, enough for us to leave that country.

And today?

Trillions spent on the war — trillions that, because President Bush didn’t require a way to pay for the war, have been added to our national debt.

Billions more spent on the wounded troops returning from that war.

Four thousand Americans dead. More than 100,000 Iraqis killed.

More than 30,000 wounded Americans, many of whom continue to suffer back in the U.S. in exchange for a sort of democracy, a tenuous one at best, and the death of a dictator.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that we supported the invasion, at least the vast majority of us did.

But if the Bush Administration officials are honest with themselves, they know that post-invasion Iraq was a series of disastrous missteps they were responsible for, missteps that led to the years of death and destruction young Americans and Iraqis faced.

Mike McClellan is a Gilbert resident and former English teacher at Dobson High School in Mesa.

More shock, no awe

Letter: More shock, no awe

Posted: Friday, March 22, 2013 5:34 pm

Letter to the Editor

March 19 this past week marked the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) later changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Just to note some of the “Shock and Awe” for our $3 trillion to $5 trillion dollar investment: 4,489 dead U.S. soldiers, 32,220 U.S. wounded. This does not include dead or wounded U.S. civilians or private contractors nor the 300,000 plus brain injury and PTSD cases.

On the Iraqi side: 1.4 million dead, 4.2 million injured and 4.5 million refugees out of a population of 24 million people. Cancer and birth defects are skyrocketing due to our use of munitions made with the toxic component depleted uranium.

I often wondered over the past 10 years what the $10 billion per month we were borrowing from other countries such as China to execute a war of choice would do for us at home concerning infrastructure, schools and health care. Sadly we will never know.

The architects of this war still say it was worth every dollar and drop of blood to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who was of little threat to his neighbors, and no threat to the U.S. George W. Bush said Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 and Dick Cheney says he would do it all over again. Of course, neither Bush nor Cheney ever has or ever will experience real war. It’s no wonder active duty soldiers are killing themselves at a rate of one per day and veterans are killing themselves at 20 per day according the the Department of Defense. Shock and Awe indeed.

Charlie Osburn

Mesa

Iraq war shock and awe!!!!

In this cartoon Bill Day seems to understand that.

Arizona National Guard reins in whistle-blowers

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Arizona National Guard reins in whistle-blowers

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Mar 26, 2013 11:27 PM

Amid an investigation of corrupt conduct in the Arizona National Guard, soldiers and airmen have been issued strict ethics guidelines that include restrictions on whistle-blower disclosure of agency information.

The “Code of Ethical Conduct” was published earlier this year by Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar during the early stages of an independent review of Guard discipline. That review was prompted by an Arizona Republic investigation raising ethical and leadership questions.

Matthew Benson, Gov. Jan Brewer’s spokesman, said the findings from that review are expected within two weeks.

The new ethics code, in a section subtitled “Protection of Agency Records and Information,” tells Guard members that “only designated individuals” may speak out.

Accompanying guidelines warn that “any release of agency information to the public or media must go through either the Public Affairs Office or the Staff Judge Advocate’s Office.”

The new code was issued Jan. 15 to all members of the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, which includes the Guard and the state Division of Emergency Management. It was accompanied by a letter from Salazar urging personnel to conduct themselves with honor and integrity — “sustaining a place where we are all proud to serve.”

The code advises Guard personnel that they must report alleged misconduct to commanders and stresses a “zero-tolerance policy toward reprisal” against whistle-blowers.

However, guidelines protect whistle-blowers only for communications to members of Congress or within armed-forces channels. Revelations to watchdog organizations or media are not covered.

The Republic’s ongoing reporting on corruption has been based largely on information from dozens of Arizona Guard members who say that the chain of command fails to combat wrongdoing and that complainants frequently are subject to retaliation.

They also say reports filed with the federal inspector general, the Arizona Governor’s Office, the National Guard Bureau and members of Congress are typically referred back to Arizona Guard command. Many of the soldiers and airmen provided documentation for those assertions.

Experts on law and ethics said the new policy is confusing because it does not define “agency information” and therefore may be perceived as a free-speech violation.

“To the degree that there’s a mandate and you can’t talk to the press, that could be problematic,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who teaches and writes about whistle-blowing.

Tom Devine, legal director for the non-profit Government Accountability Project, which operates whistleblower.org, said Guardsmen are a hybrid of state and federal military, with the legal rights of neither.

“National Guards have been in a unique loophole to all whistle-blower protections,” Devine said. “They end up with the worst of all possible worlds.”

Richard Moberly, associate dean and a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said military organizations understandably require extra security, but that makes transparency and oversight problematic.

“There’s more reason for secrecy,” he said. “Of course, that allows for the ability to cover up.”

Moberly said military systems falter when personnel feel compelled to go outside the agency because a leadership culture is perceived as corrupt.

“Here’s where whistle-blower protections fail,” he added. “If the highest people in an organization allow misconduct to continue, or if you have a culture of closing ranks and the whistle-blower becomes an outlier because they question authority.”

Salazar, the state’s top military officer, has declined to comment to The Republic since October, when a series of articles exposed widespread criminal conduct, retaliation and lax discipline in a state Guard with about 8,000 personnel.

The series described repeated incidents of sexual abuse of high-school cadets, recruiting fraud, drunken driving, fraternization, assaults, embezzlement, cronyism and reprisal against those who reported misconduct.

Salazar previously acknowledged that the recruiting command had become corrupt but said misconduct, lax discipline standards and other leadership failures were addressed. He stressed the integrity of most Guard members and denied the existence of a rogue environment.

In November, Brewer assigned Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams to conduct a “full, fair and independent review.” An Arizona Guard spokesman said in mid-January that Adams had completed his interviews and was expected to submit an investigative report by month’s end. Since then, however, numerous officers and enlisted soldiers have reported additional interviews conducted by Adams’ staff. Adams declined to comment.

The Arizona review coincides with a national scandal involving sexual abuse and harassment in the military. Reaction to that scandal has included Senate hearings two weeks ago and an ongoing investigation of rapes at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

The Defense Department has estimated that there are 19,000 sexual-abuse incidents annually in the military, with one perpetrator in 100 held accountable.

Commanders from all military branches testified about reforms instituted to combat sexual misconduct. But some U.S. senators, troubled by a permissive atmosphere, have advocated changes in the way rapes are investigated, including possible civilian prosecutors and oversight.

Brewer has previously stressed that the review of Arizona’s Guard would be independent.

Maj. Gen. Adams is a member of the Oklahoma National Guard who works in his civilian life as an administrator with Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety. He also serves as deputy commanding general with the Army Training and Doctrine Command in Virginia, which provides leadership instruction for soldiers.

Adams is working in Arizona through the National Guard Bureau, an administrative agency also based in Virginia.

Like Salazar, Adams ascended through artillery commands. E-mails obtained by The Republic show that when Adams first contacted Salazar about conducting the inquiry, his salutation read, “Hello, Hugo!”

Those e-mails also indicate that the Arizona Guard attempted to conduct an online survey during the past few months, asking soldiers and airmen to evaluate morale, leadership, integrity and stress.

Results have not been released. Records indicate the poll could be flawed if personnel chose to submit multiple entries.

Since the newspaper series was published in October, numerous soldiers and airmen have come forward with additional examples of misconduct and cover-ups.

The Republic sought documentation for many of those incidents under Arizona’s Public Records Law. In response, the Guard terminated a policy of releasing investigative files.

Legal advisers for the state agency announced that investigative records must be obtained under federal law, via the Freedom of Information Act. To date, the U.S. Army, National Guard Bureau, Air Force and Arizona Guard have not provided investigative materials.

Military documents obtained independently by The Republic show that Arizona Guard problems include numerous cases of recruiting fraud, part of a problem found to be epidemic in the military.

The Washington Post reported last year that about 1,700 recruiters were under investigation nationwide. Guard officials declined to comment or provide records on Arizona cases.

The Republic also sought an interview with Brewer and, in a letter, asked that she direct the Guard to provide investigative files as required by state law. Benson said the governor would not respond.

A friendly reminder that your taxes are due next month

Obama not the Devil in 'The Bible,' but silver-tongued

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Purcell: Obama not the Devil in 'The Bible,' but silver-tongued

Posted: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:47 am | Updated: 5:26 pm, Tue Mar 26, 2013.

Guest commentary by Tom Purcell

The devil is in the details.

Maybe I’d better explain.

As it goes, the hit History Channel show, “The Bible,” was recently called out because the actor playing the part of Satan, Moroccan-born Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, looks eerily similar to President Obama.

I don’t think Obama is the devil, but he surely has one characteristic that old Beelzebub is known for: a silver tongue.

See, many people think that if they met the devil in person, he’d be a foul-smelling, abrupt and frightening creature. The fact is, he’d appear to be the exact opposite.

He’d wear a Brooks Brothers suit and display a charming smile. He’d be affable and compassionate, and charm the socks off the unwitting.

He’d certainly NOT have our interest at heart — he’d only want to use us to achieve his own selfish goals — and many of us would probably never know it. Many would think he is our savior.

There’s no doubt Obama makes a lot of people feel this way — even though he has delivered the opposite of his many grandiose promises.

I vaguely recall talk of “hope and change” — how he’d magically cross the political aisle and bring the parties and the country together — yet we are more divided now than at any time in my lifetime and Obama has been the most partisan president in modern history.

Is not our division the result, in no small part, of the class warfare he waged to win a second term?

I vaguely recall him being elected in 2008 to address our financial crisis and get the economy going again. Instead, he gave us a massive new entitlement program and spent billions of borrowed stimulus dollars — yet unemployment is still high and economic growth remains incredibly stagnant.

Despite our massive debt, deficits and future entitlement obligations, our sweet talker in chief now assures the masses that America no longer has a spending problem.

He says we have already cut spending plenty; what we need to do is raise taxes to get things cooking.

Sure, he overplayed his hand on the sequestration cuts — which cut about $84 billion from our massive $4 trillion in annual spending. The gloom and doom he prophesied isn’t coming to pass, and his poll numbers have suffered some.

But the fact is, Obama has been successful, over and over, at saying one thing, doing another, and paying a very small political price for the difference.

Gosh, I feel sorry for Republicans. Sure, they have their failings — and were careless and reckless in spending the last time they controlled Congress and the presidency — but they are now on the regrettable side of calling for sensible reductions in government growth and for sensible reforms to taxes and entitlement programs.

What we need is a giant bipartisan effort to address those very things, led by our president, but Obama wants nothing to do with it.

Republicans are in the regrettable position of, say, having to tell an obese fellow he needs to lose weight or he’ll get diabetes, or hardened arteries, and may even suffer a heart attack five or six years down the line — while Obama promises the fellow a buffet dinner.

As I said, the guy is a maestro at saying one thing and doing another. Most in the media continue to NOT hold him to account for that — or for the many ways he is NOT leading us on the many problems we must address (spending, deficit, entitlements, tax reform).

Obama is not the devil, but, boy, does he have the silver tongue.

Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist and is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. Send comments to Tom at Purcell@caglecartoons.com.

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers

I suspect if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were alive today they would tell us that these FBI tyrants are far worse then King George and that it's people like them that they passed the Second Amendment for.

Can you imagine how people would complain if the FBI demanded the right to open and read our snail mail letters? Well this is far worse and I don't hear any public out cry against the FBI tyrants.

On the other hand I suspect the people in Nazi Germany were just as passive when Hitlers goons turned Nazi Germany into a police state.

Source

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013

By Ryan Gallagher

Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 4:58 PM

For now, law enforcement has trouble monitoring Gmail communications in real time

Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

That’s because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.

While it is true that CALEA can only be used to compel Internet and phone providers to build in surveillance capabilities into their networks, the feds do have some existing powers to request surveillance of other services. Authorities can use a “Title III” order under the “Wiretap Act” to ask email and online chat providers furnish the government with “technical assistance necessary to accomplish the interception.” However, the FBI claims this is not sufficient because mandating that providers help with “technical assistance” is not the same thing as forcing them to “effectuate” a wiretap. In 2011, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni—Weissmann’s predecessor—stated that Title III orders did not provide the bureau with an "effective lever" to "encourage providers" to set up live surveillance quickly and efficiently. In other words, the FBI believes it doesn’t have enough power under current legislation to strong-arm companies into providing real-time wiretaps of communications.

Because Gmail is sent between a user’s computer and Google’s servers using SSL encryption, for instance, the FBI can’t intercept it as it is flowing across networks and relies on the company to provide it with access. Google spokesman Chris Gaither hinted that it is already possible for the company to set up live surveillance under some circumstances. “CALEA doesn't apply to Gmail but an order under the Wiretap Act may,” Gaither told me in an email. “At some point we may expand our transparency report to cover this topic in more depth, but until then I'm not able to provide additional information.”

Either way, the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority. According to Weissmann, the bureau is working with “members of intelligence community” to craft a proposal for new Internet spy powers as “a top priority this year.” Citing security concerns, he declined to reveal any specifics. “It's a very hard thing to talk about publicly,” he said, though acknowledged that “it's something that there should be a public debate about.”

Conn. governor signs sweeping new gun bill into law

And of course without their guns the people of Connecticut won't be able to do much about it.

Source

Conn. governor signs sweeping new gun bill into law

Tribune newspapers and wire reports

11:44 a.m. CDT, April 4, 2013

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy today signed a tough new gun law that, among several key provisions, restricts sales of the sort of high-capacity ammunition clips that a gunman used to massacre 26 people in minutes in a December attack on a school.

Lawmakers in the state's Democratic-controlled House approved the measure, which supporters described as one of the toughest such laws in the United States, early on Thursday morning. The Senate approved the measure hours earlier.

The House debate stretched past midnight, with opponents of the law arguing that it infringed on the rights to gun ownership protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that efforts to prevent attacks such as the Newtown, Conn., school shooting should focus on providing better mental-health services.

Connecticut's law passed hours after Maryland's House of Delegates on Wednesday approved their own gun law, which also limits magazine size and requires that gun buyers be fingerprinted.

The Connecticut law also requires background checks for private gun sales, expands the number of guns covered by the state's assault-weapons ban and establishes a $15 million fund to help schools improve security infrastructure.

It bans specifically the sale of ammunition clips that hold 10 bullets or more and requires owners of such clips to register them by January 1, 2014. After that date, owning an unregistered high-capacity clip will become a felony offense.

The legislation was proposed after the Dec. 14 slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman used clips that held 30 bullets to fire off 154 rounds in less than five minutes. "The content of this legislation speaks for itself as really the strongest gun control legislation in the country," House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, a 50-year-old Hamden Democrat, said in a statehouse interview. "The details of this package, when reviewed by other states, will be a terrific blueprint for how to do this in a comprehensive way."

Newtown school massacre

Passage came more than three months after gunman Adam Lanza, 20, stormed into the Newtown school and mowed down students and teachers, reviving debate over gun control. Connecticut joins New York and Colorado in tightening firearms limits in the wake of the tragedy. Maryland’s House of Delegates passed a similar measure yesterday.

In Washington, congressional action on the issue has been stymied by opposition from the National Rifle Association, the nation’s biggest gun-rights lobby. President Barack Obama went to Colorado yesterday to praise that state’s new restrictions, and plans to visit Connecticut next week to pressure Congress

"Colorado is proving a model of what's possible," Obama said in Denver. "It's now been just over 100 days since the murder of 20 innocent children and six brave educators in Newtown, Connecticut, an event that shocked this country."

Lanza carried 10 30-round magazines into Sandy Hook, court documents show. He reloaded six times and fired 154 bullets from his Bushmaster AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle in less than five minutes, according to the documents. The measure approved yesterday bans sales of the weapon and similar models.

Lanza's victims front and center in debate

This week, some parents of Lanza's victims handed out pictures of their children to lawmakers who met April 1 to review the limits proposed in an accord hammered out by legislative leaders. Family members sought an outright ban on possession of high-capacity magazines, rather than the registration requirement that’s part of the final measure.

During one of the most emotional moments of the six-hour Senate debate yesterday, John McKinney, the Republican leader who represents Newtown, explained why he pins a green ribbon and a guardian angel on his lapel.

"I try to put it on my jacket every day to remember those that we've lost because I stand here, I stand here as their voice," McKinney, 49, said. He then read the names of each of the Sandy Hook victims, his voice wavering a times. Six of the 14 Republicans in the chamber voted for the measure.

Before the voting began, activists on opposite sides of the issue sparred verbally in the Capitol’s hallways.

A poll released on Thursday found that 91 percent of U.S. voters support regulations requiring all gun buyers to undergo background checks. However, 48 percent of all respondents and 53 percent of those owning guns said those checks could lead to the government's confiscating legally owned weapons.

That Quinnipiac University poll of 1,711 registered voters was conducted from March 26 to April 1 and had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

Vote makes 'everyone in this room a criminal'

"I don’t want 30-round magazines that can wipe out our children," said Dan Garrett, 53, of Hamden, speaking to a group of men wearing Connecticut Citizens Defense League stickers. Greg Kozeman, 44, of New Britain said improving mental-health access is a better solution than tighter gun limits.

Earlier, gun-rights advocates filled statehouse lobbies.

"The vote on this bill will make everyone in this room a criminal," said Warren Stevens, 58, a Plantsville gun owner. He wouldn’t say what type of guns he owns or how many.

“It is no business of the state what I own,” he said. "Their authority does not extend into my house."

Connecticut, with a long history of weapons production, is still home to six gunmakers. The companies include Sturm Ruger & Co., Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Co., Colt Defense LLC, Stag Arms, Charter Arms, O.F. Mossberg & Sons Inc., and Ammunition Storage Components LLC, which makes 30-round magazines. Some have threatened to leave if the new limits pass.

The industry employs about 7,300 people in the state and contributed $119 million in tax revenue in 2011, according to the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group. Charter Arms calls the region “the cradle of the American firearms industry.”

Reuters and Bloomberg

Cheap Drones Made in China Could Arm US Foes

Cheap Drones Made in China Could Arm US Foes

By Jeremy Hsu, TechNewsDaily Senior Writer | LiveScience.com

Cheap drones made in China could end up arming potential U.S. foes such as North Korea, Iran and terrorist organizations.

China already makes drones that don't quite match up to U.S. military drones, but for a fraction of the cost. The Chinese military envisions such unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) scouting out battlefield targets, guiding missile and artillery strikes, and swarming potential adversaries, such as U.S. carrier battle groups.

"In whatever future conflict scenario we're in five or 10 years from now, the proliferation of UAVs is going to complicate things for the U.S. military," said Ian Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute.

China has built a huge military-industrial complex to support its growing drone fleet, which consisted of about 280 military drones as of mid-2011, according to a report released by the Project 2049 Institute on March 11. Chinese manufacturers supplying the military and state agencies also have begun seeking foreign buyers in a global drone market that aerospace and defense market research firm Teal Group estimates to be worth $89 billion over the next 10 years.

Retired Chinese generals have stated on Chinese state television station CCTV that Chinese drone technology lags American technology by about five years, Easton said. However, Chinese manufacturers are touting their plans to build drones five or even 10 times cheaper than comparable U.S. drones, whose hardware alone costs $5 million to $10 million. [Video: RoboBees: Design Poses Intriguing Engineering Challenges]

The idea of cheap, China-made drones may not tempt countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia or NATO allies that want to buy the best U.S. or Israeli drone hardware. Instead, China is seeking buyers in the Middle East and Africa at glitzy expositions such as China’s biennial Zhuhai Air Show.

"In the area of the Middle East, there could be direct competition, and the Chinese would have an advantage because they can apparently make UAVs cheaper," Easton told TechNewsDaily. "For countries that don't demand the best technology, good enough would be good enough."

That means countries such as Syria might obtain Chinese drones for the surveillance or oppression of their own citizens, Easton said. He added that Chinese drones also could end up in the hands of North Korea or Iran — regional hotspots where the U.S. military may potentially find itself embroiled in future conflicts.

Iran has already sold its own crude drones to countries such as Syria and organizations such as Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. In addition, China-made drones would allow countries like Iran and North Korea to obtain technology which Western countries refuse to sell.

"It's bad enough that China has that kind of capability, but the same capability could end up in the hands of the Iranians or North Koreans or a terrorist group like Hezbollah that Iran is cooperating with," Easton said.

The U.S. has already shown the world how battlefield drone surveillance and drone strikes can prove both effective and controversial. Still, the U.S. military faces a new challenge in detecting swarms of China-made drones during future conflicts, Easton said. Some drones may go undetected by radar because they can fly extremely low and may come in small sizes.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood

By MARK MAZZETTI

Published: April 6, 2013 Comment

The C.I.A. has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas.

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.

Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A. officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.

Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.

Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.

As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”

From Car Thief to Militant

By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.

Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.

When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.

For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.

C.I.A. officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.

A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.

Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

"In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time." PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, the Pakistani president whose government reached a deal with the C.I.A., allowing it to carry out secret drone strikes in Pakistan.

Mr. Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one C.I.A. officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”

A New Direction

As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”

The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.

Before long the C.I.A. would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.

Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.

The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.

A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.

The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Mr. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.

John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.

“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’

“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.

The Account at the Time

After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”

This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.

Emperor Obama is a blood thirsty murderer just like George W. Bush!!!!

Rise of the Predators

Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 7, 2013 51 Comments

WASHINGTON — When Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was taken into American custody at an airport stopover in Jordan last month, he joined one of the most select groups of the Obama era: high-level terrorist suspects who have been located by the American counterterrorism juggernaut, and who have not been killed.

John O. Brennan, now C.I.A. director, said last year the preference was to use lethal force only when capture was not feasible.

Mr. Abu Ghaith’s case — he awaits a federal criminal trial in New York — is a rare illustration of what Obama administration officials have often said is their strong preference for capturing terrorists rather than killing them.

“I have heard it suggested that the Obama administration somehow prefers killing Al Qaeda members rather than capturing them,” said John O. Brennan, in a speech last year when he was the president’s counterterrorism adviser; he is now the C.I.A. director. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

In fact, he said, “Our unqualified preference is to only undertake lethal force when we believe that capturing the individual is not feasible.”

Despite Mr. Brennan’s protestations, an overwhelming reliance on killing terrorism suspects, which began in the administration of George W. Bush, has defined the Obama years. Since Mr. Obama took office, the C.I.A. and military have killed about 3,000 people in counterterrorist strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, mostly using drones. Only a handful have been caught and brought to this country; an unknown number have been imprisoned by other countries with intelligence and other support from the United States.

This policy on targeted killing, according to experts on counterterrorism inside and outside the government, is shaped by several factors: the availability of a weapon that does not risk American casualties; the resistance of the authorities in Pakistan and Yemen to even brief incursions by American troops; and the decreasing urgency of interrogation at a time when the terrorist threat has diminished and the United States has deep intelligence on its enemies.

Though no official will publicly acknowledge it, the bottom line is clear: killing is more convenient than capture for both the United States and the foreign countries where the strikes occur.

The drone strikes have become unpopular abroad; in a Pew Research Center poll last year, just 17 percent of Pakistanis supported them against leaders of extremist groups. And domestic critics have attacked from two different directions: Some Republicans in Congress accuse Mr. Obama of adopting a de facto kill preference because he shut down the C.I.A.’s overseas prisons and does not want to send more detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Human rights advocates argue that some drone strikes have amounted to extrajudicial killings, the execution without trial of people suspected of being militants whose identities American officials often do not know and who sometimes pose little threat to the United States.

But with the American public, the strikes remain popular. Even as some senior former American security officials question whether the strikes are beginning to do more harm than good, 65 percent of Americans questioned in a Gallup poll last month approved of strikes to kill suspected foreign terrorists; only 28 percent were opposed.

Mr. Brennan’s criterion for capture — when it is “feasible” — is a very subjective judgment, said Matthew C. Waxman, a former Defense Department official who is now at Columbia Law School.

“Those simple statements about a preference to capture mask a much more complicated story,” Mr. Waxman said. “The U.S. military and intelligence community can do a great deal if they’re directed to do it. Sometimes where we say it’s infeasible, we mean it’s too risky.”

But he believes the hazards of a capture strategy are real. “I think in most cases we could not capture people without significant risk to our own forces or to diplomatic relations,” he said.

The uncertainties were evident nine months into Mr. Obama’s first term, when intelligence agencies tracked down Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a suspect in the attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.

The original plan had been to fire long-range missiles to hit Mr. Nabhan and others as they drove in a convoy from Mogadishu, Somalia, to the seaside town of Baraawe. But that plan was scrubbed at the last minute, and instead a Navy SEALs team helicoptered from a ship and strafed Mr. Nabhan’s convoy, killing him and three others. The SEALs landed to collect DNA samples to confirm the identities of the dead.

The episode raised uncomfortable questions for some at the Pentagon. If the United States took the risk to land troops in Somalia, they wondered, why did they not capture Mr. Nabhan instead of killing him?

Or consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who had joined the Qaeda branch in Yemen. In September 2011, when American intelligence located him, it might conceivably have been possible to organize a capture by Yemeni or American commandos. But a drone strike was politically far less complicated for both countries, said Gregory D. Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton.

If American forces captured him, their presence on Yemeni soil might have spurred unrest, Mr. Johnsen said. If the forces of the Yemeni president at the time, Ali Abdullah Saleh, caught him, he said, “Does he turn him over to the Americans and risk a backlash? Does he hold him? It was easier for Saleh to let the Americans take a shot at Awlaki than to send his troops to catch him.”

The trade-offs have not changed under Yemen’s new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who lauded the precision of drone strikes in a 2012 speech in Washington. Two months later, an American strike killed Adnan al-Qadhi, a well-connected Qaeda supporter, even though he was in a town near the capital, Sana, where several high-level officials live. Neighbors told reporters that he could easily have been captured.

In Pakistan, where the SEAL raid that killed Bin Laden sent Pakistani-American relations into a tailspin, drone strikes — though deeply unpopular — are tolerated by the security establishment. “There’s an intangible notion that a drone flying over is less of an intrusion than troops on the ground,” said Ashley S. Deeks, a University of Virginia law professor and a former State Department lawyer.

Then there is the question of very real danger to Americans in capturing heavily armed terrorists. The SEALs sent to Abbottabad were instructed that if Bin Laden immediately surrendered, he should be detained, according to Matt Bissonnette, a member of the SEAL team who wrote a book on the raid. But if Americans died trying to catch a midlevel militant — when drones were available but went unused — there would be a huge public outcry, most officials believe.

Only in the drone era has killing terrorism suspects become routine. In the 1980s and 1990s, counterterrorism officers captured several suspects overseas and brought them back to the United States for trial.

Brad Garrett, a former F.B.I. agent, was on the teams that caught both Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an organizer of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, and Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot five C.I.A. employees, two of them fatally, outside the agency’s headquarters in Virginia the same year. Teams of American and Pakistani officers caught the men by kicking down doors at their guesthouses, and “no shots were fired in either case,” he said.

As an investigator, Mr. Garrett said, “I’ve spent my life talking to live people. That’s the downside of drones. There’s no one left to talk to.” But he said that catching a solo suspect in an urban setting, while risky, was far less hazardous than confronting a gang of heavily armed men in the hostile territory of Pakistan’s or Yemen’s tribal areas. “I don’t think you can really compare them,” he said.

When Mr. Obama closed the C.I.A. prisons and banned coercive interrogations, Republicans complained that there was nowhere left to hold and question terrorists, a charge that resonated with some military and C.I.A. officers. The president countered by creating a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, an elite group of analysts and interrogators that officials say has been sent about two dozen times to question detainees at home and abroad. That is a tiny number compared to the frequency of drone strikes, of course, but officials say the secretive group has been successful.

An even smaller number of those questioned by the interrogation group have been brought back to the United States to face criminal charges, including Mr. Abu Ghaith, the Bin Laden son-in-law, and Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali commander of the militant group Shabab.

By all accounts, Mr. Warsame’s handling is a powerful illustration of the value of capturing rather than killing a terrorism suspect. He first began providing information to American counterterrorism officials after being caught on a ship in April 2011. He has never stopped talking about both the Shabab and the Qaeda branch in Yemen, officials say, and he knows that his ultimate sentence will depend on his cooperation.

There are signs that the Obama administration may itself have grown wary of the convenience of targeted killing — or may be running out of high-level targets. After a sharp rise in Mr. Obama’s first two years, the total number of drone strikes is now in sharp decline.

In Pakistan, strikes peaked in 2010 at 117; the number fell to 64 in 2011, 46 in 2012, with 11 so far this year, according to The Long War Journal, which covers the covert wars. In Yemen, while strikes shot up to 42 in 2012, no strikes have been reported since a flurry of drone hits in January, according to several organizations that track strikes.

In his State of the Union address in February, Mr. Obama pledged more transparency for the drone program, and he and his aides have hinted that changes are coming. It remains unclear what the administration has in mind, but the president has spoken of the treacherous allure of the drone.

Decisions on targeted killing, he told CNN in September, are “something that you have to struggle with.”

“If you don’t, then it’s very easy to slip into a situation in which you end up bending rules thinking that the ends always justify the means,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not who we are as a country.”

Why is North Korea our problem?

Source

Why is North Korea our problem?

As tensions mount, this question is being asked too infrequently: Why is North Korea primarily a U.S. problem?

At the moment, it is inescapably a U.S. problem. The leader of the country is threatening to lob nukes at us. We may doubt his seriousness or capabilities. Nevertheless, the threat cannot be ignored. [Rubbish!! They can't even feed their own people, much less lob nukes at the USA]

But did it have to end up this way?

North Korea is an extortionist regime. It saber-rattles at least in part to get other countries to give it stuff to stop.

The United States, under both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, played North Korea’s game. Since 1995, U.S. taxpayers have given North Korea over $1 billion in food and energy assistance, supposedly in exchange for it mothballing its nuclear programs.

North Korea poses a more credible threat to South Korea and Japan than to the United States. But a threat to those countries is, at least in some respects, a threat to the United States, since we have provided both countries with security guarantees – a commitment reiterated and made explicit recently by Secretary of State John Kerry.

Why is it in U.S. interests to make a threat to them automatically a threat to us that we have to handle? [It's not, but it is a lame excuse for the corporations in the military industrial complex to lobby for more money. And of course it is also a lame excuse for the Admirals and Generals to demand more money for their fiefdoms.]

South Korea has twice as many people as North Korea and an economy that’s 40 times larger. Japan has a population five times that of North Korea and an economy more than 100 times larger.

Both South Korea and Japan have ample resources to provide for their own security, particularly with respect to any conventional threat posed by North Korea.

There are two complicating factors: China and the North Korean nukes.

The North Korean extortionist regime would collapse without China propping it up. China keeps it alive in part out of a domestic fear of a giant refugee headache if it failed. But also as a strategic buffer against perceived encroachment by the United States.

The Obama administration has famously pivoted to the Asian Pacific. China perceives that this is to contain its regional influence. The administration unpersuasively denies this. What other regional strategic threat is there that would warrant an ongoing enlarged U.S. military presence?

China’s neighbors worry that it has hegemonic ambitions. But the other major powers in the region – India and Australia in addition to South Korea and Japan – collectively roughly match China in population, economic size and current military spending. Except for India, the other regional powers also have GDP per capita about three times higher than China’s. That means that they have greater capacity to enhance military capabilities than China, if necessary.

Without an oversized U.S. presence and role, China’s calculation regarding North Korea might be different. North Korea is a drain on China’s resources. South Korea and Japan are a $200 billion export market for it.

The U.S. position is the fewer nuclear powers in the world the better. So, we extend our nuclear deterrent to allies facing a nuclear threat. We don’t want even more good guys to have nukes. [Personally I don't think ANY good guys have nukes. The American Empire is just as evil and corrupt as the Soviet, Chinese, Pakistan, English, French, Israeli and Indian governments]

But making that deterrent credible and unexercised requires us to get involved in virtually any regional dispute involving a nuclear bad guy.

If the United States had more robustly developed missile defense capabilities over the last decade or so, we might be in a position to argue to good guys (or even not so good guys) facing nuclear bad guys that missile defense was a sufficient deterrent. But we’ve slow-walked missile defense development and that’s a claim currently open to doubt. [Give me a break!!! We don't need a "Star Wars" missile shield to protect us from a bunch of starving North Koreans who even if they could, wouldn't lob a nuke at the US because they know it is guaranteed suicide.]

If bad guys are going to proliferate, and if missile defense provides insufficient assurance, the United States may need to rethink its view that no new good guys, regardless of circumstances, should go nuclear. A nuclear South Korea and Japan would pose no threat to the United States, but it might relieve us of the need to truck with the likes of North Korea.

It’s been six decades since the end of the Korean War. It’s been four decades since Nixon went to China. It’s been over two decades since the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended.

At this point, North Korea shouldn’t be primarily our problem.

Background checks on knife purchases????

And perhaps limit knife sales to knives with blades under 2 inches in length with dull blades. Society will be a safer place if people can only have dull butter knives, and only cops and government rulers are allowed to have sharp steak and other assault knives.

I'm just joking, but I wouldn't be surprised if some phoney baloney Arizona Libertarians I know try to say I actually believe that rubbish.

Source

Student charged in Texas college stabbing attack

Associated Press Wed Apr 10, 2013 7:54 AM

CYPRESS, Texas — A 20-year-old man from suburban Houston has been charged in a stabbing spree at a Texas community college that injured at least 14 people.

Sheriff’s officials say Dylan Quick is charged with three counts of aggravated assault in the Tuesday attack at Lone Star Community College in Cypress. The city is about 20 miles from Houston.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says in a statement that Quick used a “razor-type knife” to cut his victims, and pieces of the blade were found at the scene.

The sheriff’s office says Quick told investigators he’d had fantasies about stabbing people to death since he was in elementary school.

Investigators also say Quick indicated he’d been planning the attack for some time.

Rep. Bob Thorpe tries to protect his fellow crooks from us serfs???

The only good news about this article is that the crooks at the Arizona State Legislator seem to realize that they are crooks and need to protect themselves from the people they pretend to serve while they rob us blind.

Last if Rep. Bob Thorpe really is a "Tea Party" members who wants to protect us from the other government crooks, why is he trying to help protect his fellow crooks???

I suspect Rep. Bob Thorpe isn't really a "freedom fighter" and just ran on the "Tea Party" platform because it would help him get elected.

Source

Posted on April 9, 2013 3:30 pm by Laurie Roberts

Rep. Bob Thorpe looking for protection — and not just from bullets

In the wake of Sandy Hook, the state of Connecticut last Thursday enacted some of the strongest gun laws in the country, including limits on the size of magazines, a ban on armor piercing bullets and universal background checks.

Meanwhile, in the state of Arizona, a legislator on Thursday offered a response to our own massacre.

“In the wake of Tucson shooting, I have been researching body armor in order to inform our members about the costs and options for those wishing to purchase a vest for their personal use, for example, at town halls, parades and other public events,” Rep. Bob Thorpe, wrote, in an e-mail to fellow legislators. “These vests have prices ranging from about $600-$800, and options that include their weight and comfort, bullet stopping ability and colors.”

You’ve heard of Tupperware parties? Thorpe invited the Arizona Legislature to a body armor party. On Wednesday, a salesman from Arizona Tactical was supposed to be on hand in the House basement to offer discounts and take orders on the latest in tactical fashion.

Alas, legislative lawyers put the kibosh on Thorpe’s sale-a-thon. It’s seems you’re not supposed to use the state Capitol to sell bulletproof vests. Or anything else.

Now Thorpe is apparently steamed that his “internal” e-mail invite – the one sent out on his public e-mail account — wound up in the hands of the media.

“I’d love to know who leaked my email to the press, because I want to present them with a ‘Members Only’ jacket, as a reminder that some things, like my internal e-mail invitation, are intended for members only,” the Flagstaff Republican wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.

Like his first e-mail, this one made it to my inbox within 15 minutes of his sending it.

Thorpe is a freshman legislator who made headlines earlier this year for his bill to require students to sign a loyalty oath before they could graduate from school — a bill he withdrew once somebody explained to him that it was blatantly unconstitutional. He’s a Tea Party guy who ran on a platform of protecting the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

Including, presumably, the law that says the Arizona Legislature is a public body – not the Augusta National Golf Club. And the one that says e-mail sent out on a government account is government business.

Or put another way: the public’s business.

Thorpe didn’t return my call to discuss public records and body armor and such. Pity, as I would have liked to ask him if that Members Only jacket would be outfitted in Kevlar.

In his Tuesday e-mail, Thorpe takes a shot at Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego — whom he suspects of “leaking” his e-mail – and notes that he arranged to have the body armor salesman come to the Capitol after a Democratic legislator told him she’d requested a police presence at a recent town hall meeting.

“She was concerned about her personal safety,” he wrote. “By the way, I sent out my e-mail invitation to all the House and Senate legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, because of my concern for the safety of all our members.”

Given his concern for safety, Thorpe might want to take up the cause for banning the sort of ammunition that would blast right through those bulletproof vests he’s hawking.

Sadly, his Senate colleagues rejected a ban on armor piercing bullets last week, along with a ban on high-capacity magazines and a call for universal background checks.

The irony wasn’t lost on Democrats.

“There are just so many other things that we should be working on and not just focused on our own personal safety but the personal safety of the public and for the children in our schools,” said Gallego, D-Phoenix.

“It’s is sad to see that we are almost at the 100th day of our session and yet we have not had a comprehensive discussion on gun violence for our constituents of Arizona,” Sen. Anna Tovar, D-Tolleson, told me.

For his part, Thorpe has provided his fellow legislators with the name and number for his body armor salesman. “His store is about a 10-minute drive from the Capitol and he’d like to try and arrange a time where perhaps 5 (or more) legislators can come in at a time for a joint briefing in one of their classrooms,” he wrote.

No doubt, Thorpe’s pal will have plenty of takers.

In addition to strafing other gun bills last week, the state Senate also rejected a bid to require basic firearms-safety training before you can carry around a concealed weapon.

Thus, the need, I suppose, for legislative body armor — to protect our leaders from the public.

Now, if only there was a way to protect the public from our leaders…

VA official in Arizona demoted after her testimony

VA official in Arizona demoted after her testimony

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 28, 2013 11:19 PM

A longtime spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Arizona has been removed from her post, allegedly because she breached security by asking her husband to upload photographs of the Phoenix Veterans Day Parade onto a secure government website.

Paula Pedene, a 23-year employee with the VA Health Care System, is fighting her reassignment to the hospital library, claiming she is a victim of reprisal by current administrators for testimony she gave against former administrators who left their jobs amid federal inquiries, according to records obtained by The Arizona Republic.

Pedene’s legal advisers and VA records indicate the dispute stems from a larger controversy involving years of mismanagement, squandered funds, discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation at the Phoenix VA.

Pedene, the Veterans Day Parade coordinator since 1997, was notified of her transfer in a Dec. 10 letter from Associate Director Lance Robinson. He wrote that she was the subject of a “very serious” allegation, and he issued a gag order prohibiting public disclosures.

Pedene declined to comment. But her defenders said the investigation constitutes thinly disguised retribution for sworn statements Pedene made about misconduct by previous administrators in Phoenix who quit the agency amid federal investigations.

In a Dec. 12 letter to Robinson, employee-relations consultant Roger French characterized the disciplinary action as payback.

“The fact that you have taken a serious action that you are unable to back up with appropriate evidence ... may result in significant litigation,” he warned.

Joseph Abodeely, an attorney for Pedene, sent another letter to Robinson on Feb. 11 demanding that she be returned to her job. Abodeely noted that Pedene’s husband is an authorized VA volunteer who was asked by his wife to post photographs on the agency website because of his wife’s disability. Pedene is blind. Abodeely criticized agency administrators for treating that event as a “heinous breach of security.”

“You have unjustly embarrassed, humiliated and defamed Paula Pedene long enough,” he added.

Former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who chairs the parade-sponsoring Veterans Commemorative Committee of Phoenix, said he authorized Pedene to hire her husband as a photographer and cannot understand VA administrators’ response to a seemingly minor transgression.

“Quite frankly, this is peanuts in the security world,” said Romley, who in 2006 served as special security adviser to the secretary of Veterans Affairs in Washington. “At the most, she should be orally counseled. She is so committed to veterans, it’s just unbelievable. … Nobody questions her sincerity in wanting to do things right.”

Paul Coupard, a VA spokesman, said Robinson and VA Director Sharon Helman would not discuss personnel matters. They also declined to comment on whether any computer records had been destroyed, altered or compromised by the alleged security breach.

Allegations of a hostile workplace

The $438 million Phoenix VA Health Care System provides medical care for about 81,000 veterans through the Carl T. Hayden Veterans Affairs Medical Center and seven outpatient clinics. The Public Affairs Office writes news releases, produces fact sheets and coordinates media coverage.

During 2011, the national inspector general for the VA investigated mismanagement in Arizona that cost taxpayers $11.4 million, due to excess spending on private care for patients. That included $4.5 million in unauthorized payments. The report blamed systemic and leadership failures for controls so weak that $56 million in medical fees were paid during 2010 without adequate review. The oversight failures caused a cutback in medical services and equipment for Phoenix veterans.

According to VA records, Pedene was interviewed in May 2011 by a federal administrative board convened to probe the misspending along with allegations of sexual harassment and a hostile workplace.

Employee-relations consultant French, who no longer represents Pedene, attended the hearing by telephone. He said Pedene testified that the Phoenix VA suffered from leadership run amok. She said that agency bosses intimidated female employees and that then-Director Gabriel Perez threatened her with banishment to a basement workspace, making it clear he did not want a woman — or someone with a service-connected disability — as the VA’s public-affairs officer.

Perez, who had been appointed in 2009 to lead the Phoenix VA and served as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officer, retired while inquiries were under way. He could not be reached for comment.

Pedene had been called as a witness in the case, which was initiated by employee Sheila Cain, who in 2010 was assistant chief of the Phoenix VA’s Health Administration Services. Cain, a former soldier, had sought to repair problems with the agency’s budget and fee-payment systems. According to agency reports, her efforts led to infighting over blame and responsibility. Cain could not be reached for comment.

Cain filed a series of grievances alleging that she was subjected to false accusations, denied due process, stripped of authority and isolated in a basement workspace for six months. An EEOC complaint says Cain endured sexual remarks, threats, improper touching, public humiliation and other abuse more than 30 times.

In one instance, she alleged that Dr. Christopher Bacorn, then deputy director, hit her rear end with a spatula in front of a fellow employee. Bacorn could not be reached for comment.

‘She stood up and told the truth’

The VA has not released investigative and disciplinary records requested March 13 by The Arizona Republic under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Documents obtained independently by The Republic show Cain also was victimized by unlawful access to her medical records. French said an investigation of that patient-confidentiality breach resulted in the discipline of at least nine employees of the health system, some of whom left the agency.

French said the VA settled the case. Cain remains with the agency but not under the supervision of Phoenix administrators. In the meantime, French said, Pedene became a target of similar treatment under new bosses. Her reassignment to the hospital library, initially set at 30 days, is in its third month.

Under Pedene’s PR leadership, the Phoenix VA won three prestigious Silver Anvil awards from the Public Relations Society of America.

French, who has represented about 40 VA employees in grievances, said he has seen a pattern of abuse, discrimination and retaliation in the Phoenix VA. He said Pedene was criticized for her blindness, and administrators dismantled a public-relations program once considered among the nation’s best. Recently, he added, Pedene’s name was redacted from the VA’s online employee directory, and her awards were removed from a display case at the Phoenix VA.

“She stood up and told the truth,” French said. “It cost (administrators) their jobs, and they threatened to destroy adversaries and families.”

French, who was a VA personnel officer and investigator for 33 years, asked Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to launch a new inquiry. French’s Feb. 12 letter complains of nepotism, retaliation and improper downgrading of evaluations. He said victims are disproportionately female and Black.

“I have never seen the hostility, cavalier violations of regulations and laws (or) lack of dignity and respect for employees,” French wrote to Shinseki.

Shinseki did not respond, French said.

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

Constitutional Safeguards??? Don't make me laugh!!!!!

And of course as long as the mayor and city council of New York allows this illegal activity there ain't jack sh*t we can do to stop it.

Of course that is why the Founders gave us the Second Amendment. So when our government masters refuse to obey the law, the people have a means to force them to obey the law.

Of course in New York State the people's right to own guns has pretty much been flushed down the toilet by these same tyrants who allow the police to terrorize us.

And of course this isn't limited to New York State or New York City, it is happens all over the USA.

Source

An Assurance of Constitutional Safeguards

Faiza Patel

April 9, 2013

New York City has become safer over the last decade. Yet relations between the police and minority communities have become ever more strained.

Much of the tension stems from the N.Y.P.D.’s stop and frisk policy, which disproportionately targets black and Latino men. Muslim communities are troubled by the NYPD’s intelligence operation, which collects information about their daily lives that often seems to have no link to terrorism or crime.

Oversight of N.Y.P.D. activities like stop and frisk and the surveillance of Muslims shouldn't require decades of litigation.

An inspector-general could help the police ease these concerns and hew closer to constitutional requirements in their efforts to keep the city safe.

Crucial constitutional protections — like the requirement of equal treatment and the need for reasonable suspicion before searching someone — have been codified into specific rules for the N.Y.P.D. But we have little assurance that they are followed.

As part of the 2003 settlement of the first stop and frisk lawsuit, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly issued an order forbidding the N.Y.P.D. from relying on race, color, ethnicity or national origin as the determinative factor in undertaking action. Yet since these rules were adopted, the stop and frisk program has grown 450 percent, with nearly five million people — 81 percent of whom are minorities — stopped, questioned and searched.

These numbers have led many to ask whether the police are following the racial profiling ban. An inspector general would be ideally situated to audit the records of stop and frisk encounters for compliance.

Similarly, the N.Y.P.D.’s surveillance of Muslim communities has raised questions about police fidelity to the prohibition on religion-based targeting and to a 1985 consent decree that restrains their monitoring of First Amendment activities. Documents recently filed in this case show that the N.Y.P.D. has informants or undercover officers in at least 30 area mosques. Interested citizens cannot delve into police files to evaluate whether the widespread use of informants was justified or a reflection of biases. But an inspector general can do just that.

The lawyers challenging these practices know the difficulty of ensuring that police comply with rules and have asked for court-appointed police monitors to do so. We should not have to wait for decades of litigation to obtain oversight of N.Y.P.D. activities.

On these and other police operations, an inspector general would serve as front-end protection against illegality. Periodic reports from the inspector general would increase much-needed, impartial public information about police practices, helping elected officials perform their own oversight duties.

And, while an inspector general’s recommendations are not binding, the experience of the F.B.I. and the Los Angeles police, among others, shows that they can be highly influential in shaping lawful and effective law enforcement practices.

As the nation’s premier police department, the N.Y.P.D. should embrace the best practices developed by its peers and commit to working unreservedly with an inspector general to create an even better police force.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is a liar who will say anything to get elected!!!

Source

Quan flubs crime stat, again

Post has been updated as of 5:50 p.m.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has gained a reputation for citing crime statistics that don’t always add up or making statements to the press she later says were taken out of context.

It’s happened again.

In an interview with KCBS radio broadcast on Monday, Oakland’s mayor said the following:

For the last 2 months, violence in Oakland has been way down. It seems to come in these spurts. So like for six weeks there had been no murders east of High Street in East Oakland.

Problem is, there have been seven homicides east of High Street over the past six weeks, according to Shine in Peace, an online journalism project launching soon that’s tracking shootings and homicides in Oakland and noticed Quan’s statement.

“There’s no six-week period in 2013 where there were no homicides east of High Street,” said Susie Cagle, the project director.

Cagle said the homicides over the past six weeks included the following:

• Lionel Ray Fluker, 54, killed on April 4 near MacArthur Boulevard and Seminary Avenue.
• Qiunn Boyer, 34, died on April 4, two days after being shot near Keller Avenue and Hansom Drive.
• John Sunny Davis, 31, killed on Mar. 31 near 68th Avenue and Avenal Avenue.
• unidentified, killed on Mar. 31 near 70th Ave. and Hawley Street.
• unidentified, killed Mar. 31 on the 8900 block of International Boulevard.
• Noe Garcia, 28, killed on Mar. 2 near Apricot Street and Blenheim Street.
• Trisha Forde, 34, killed on Mar. 2 near Apricot Street and Blenheim Street.

Sean Maher, Quan’s spokesman, said the quote to KCBS was taken out of context in two important ways. Quan was only talking about gang-related homicides because she was discussing the effectiveness of Ceasefire, an anti-gang prevention program, Maher said.

Secondly, the mayor was talking about a specific period of time, Feb. 22 through Mar. 30. During that period, only the Mar. 2 double homicide killing Forde and Garcia occurred east of High Street in East Oakland — the target area of the gang-prevention efforts, Maher said. Police have said that homicide was not gang-related, he said.

Maher acknowledged that the period of time Quan referred to was only five weeks.

“Unfortunately, the KCBS report cuts their interview in a way that can be misleading,” said Maher. “Obviously, the mayor is aware of the recent spate of homicides that began on Easter Sunday.”

Cagle said her project’s data corroborates what Maher said. But she noted that there were five homicides east of High Street on Mar. 31 through Apr. 4. She said that hardly conveys success in reducing homicides.

“It seems like an odd thing to even be publicizing,” she said.

The IRS is monitoring your Facebook and Twitter accounts???

I discovered that the FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF, Secret Service, or some other Federal agency is spying on me after I installed Google Analytics on my website.

Every day I get one or two hits from an IP address in the Washington, DC suburb of Shady Side, Maryland which I suspect is a headquarters for some Federal government site that spies on Americans.

I should say the city and the IP address changes over time, but it is pretty obvious that somebody in the Federal government is spying on me.

For those of you who wish to use Google Analytics to see if the government is spying on you it is free and this link will tell you how to install the software.

To get Google Analytics working on your web site all you have to do is create a free account with them and then put the following lines of code on each of your web pages.

Google will give you the following code, which you will have to cut and paste on to your web pages. The account number which has been replaced with "*************" will be replaced with your account number.

Last but not least you don't need to understand any of this computer mumbo jumbo to use Google Analytics.

Just cut and paste the code Google gives you and you will be on your way to seeing the government thugs that are spying on you.

Once you create the Google account you can visit the Google Analytics site and get reports on who is visiting your websites on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect if enough people start doing this Uncle Sam's goons will cut a deal with Google Analytics and order them not to tell you when Uncle Sam's goons visit your website.

BP murdered 16 year old Jose Rodriguez????

Source

New details in Mexico teenager's death by Border Patrol

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:18 AM

A new witness and new evidence seem to bolster the case that a Mexican teen shot to death by the Border Patrol in October in Nogales, Sonora, was walking down the street at the time he was killed — not, as the Border Patrol has maintained, throwing rocks over the fence at agents.

The new information also suggests that more than one agent may have opened fire on Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16. That information arrived as the family of the youth held a march on Wednesday in Nogales to protest what they called the FBI and Border Patrol’s “veil of silence” about the killing.

Both the bureau and the patrol have declined to comment on the boy’s death, citing an ongoing FBI investigation. They have declined to identify the agent or agents involved and have declined to release a surveillance video of the incident, shot by cameras mounted above the border fence.

Agents, along with Nogales, Ariz., police, were chasing two men they believed were fleeing back to Mexico after climbing over the fence to the U.S. side with drugs. The agents said rocks began flying over the fence at them as they tried to arrest the men climbing back over the fence.

The new witness, Isidro Alvarado, a private security guard, said on the night of Oct. 10, he was walking about 20 feet behind Elena Rodriguez down Calle Internacional, which runs parallel to the border fence, when two other youths suddenly ran past them. Then, he said, he heard gunshots from two separate places by the fence and saw Elena Rodriguez fall.

Alvarado said his brother, a Nogales police officer, persuaded him to come forward and speak to the Sonora Attorney General’s Office. Alvarado’s statements were first reported by Nogales radio station XENY. He also spoke at a news conference Wednesday in Nogales, Sonora.

Luis Parra, a Nogales, Ariz., attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family, said he recently interviewed Alvarado and then confirmed with an attorney from the Sonora Attorney General’s Office that the first call to Nogales police reporting the shooting, immediately after it happened, came from Alvarado’s cellphone.

“But what has made the family even more distraught,” he said, “are the indications that two agents were involved in the shooting and that he (Elena Rodriguez) had to have been lying on the ground when five bullets penetrated his back.”

In a forensic scene-analysis report, investigators for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office concluded that at least five shots into Elena Rodriguez’s back must have hit him while he was lying on the sidewalk. This jibes with findings in an autopsy, previously reported by The Arizona Republic, that all but one of the bullets that hit the boy entered from behind and most at an angle suggesting he was prone when hit.

In their forensic report, investigators also describe how they climbed the story-and-a-half-high bluff on which the border fence sits and looked through the fence as Border Patrol agents and Nogales, Ariz., police conducted their investigation on the U.S. side of the fence.

They describe an area next to the fence, cordoned off with police tape, where they counted 11 shell casings, and another taped-off area, about 28 feet away, where they could see three more casings. This seems to suggest, Parra said, that agents fired from two different spots along the fence.

A Sonora ballistics report, meanwhile, describes the nine bullets recovered by Mexican police — six from the boy’s body, and three from the street — as hollow-point, .40-caliber slugs fired from one or more polygonal-rifled guns.

Michael Haag, a forensic scientist and ballistics expert based in Albuquerque, reviewed the report. He said this is a relatively uncommon type of rifling, a type used in the Heckler & Koch P2000 handgun, among others.

That is the standard-issue Border Patrol sidearm, a spokesman confirmed.

The ballistics report said polygonal rifling, which leaves a much smoother barrel than conventional rifling, makes it harder to distinguish whether all the bullets were fired by the same gun or different guns.

“Because it leaves no good marks on the bullets, it’s very rare by forensic science to identify the bullets back to a specific gun,” Haag agreed. He added, “You can ID it sometimes, so it should be attempted.”

He also noted that each Border Patrol agent should have told the FBI whether he or she fired shots that night.

The Sonora ballistics report identified the bullets as Starfire hollow points, but Haag said the poor-quality photocopies of the bullets show cannelures — a ring that runs around the circumference of the bullet — that are not found on Starfire rounds but are consistent with the similar Federal Premium HST .40-caliber rounds.

Those are standard-issue ammunition for the H&K P2000 handgun, a Border Patrol spokesman confirmed.

The Department of Homeland Security expects shortly to complete a review of the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policy, which allows agents to fire at rock-throwers, Secretary Janet Napolitano said in an interview with The Republic last week.

There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.

Reach the reporter at bob.ortega@arizonarepublic.com

NRA - Worlds largest gun control organization???

Some people like to say that the NRA is the worlds largest gun control organization.

I think this editorial cartoon by Steve Benson on April 11, 2013 gives credibility to that.

In the cartoon NRA leader Wayne LaPierre is picture on TV saying

We think it is reasonable to provide instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.

Who is that idiotic bobblehead.

It's you Wayne, don't you remember.

Testimony before House Judiciary Committee on Crime, 27, May 1999

You get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!

Source

Guantanamo dogged by new controversy after mishandling of e-mails

By Peter Finn, Published: April 11

The military justice system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been dogged by charges of secret monitoring of proceedings and defense communications, became embroiled in a fresh controversy Thursday when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of defense e-mails were turned over to the prosecution.

The breach prompted Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel, to order all attorneys for Guantanamo detainees to stop using Defense Department computer networks to transmit privileged or confidential information until the security of such communications is assured.

Army Col. James Pohl, the chief judge at Guantanamo, also ordered a two-month delay in pre­trial proceedings in the military-commission case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of organizing the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Defense attorneys in the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed , the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-defendants filed an emergency motion — via a handwritten note — seeking a similar pause in proceedings.

Pretrial hearings in both cases were set to resume this month.

“Is there any security for defense attorney information?” said James Connell, attorney for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, one of the Sept. 11 defendants. “This new disclosure is simply the latest in a series of revelations of courtroom monitoring, hidden surveillance devices and legal-bin searches.”

The inappropriate transfer of the e-mails follows other questions about government intrusion and secrecy that have undermined the legitimacy of a judicial process that has struggled to establish itself as an effective forum for the prosecution of some terrorism cases.

In February, a military lawyer acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside devices that looked like smoke detectors in rooms used for meetings between defense counsel and their clients. The military said the listening system was not used to eavesdrop on confidential meetings and had been installed before defense lawyers started to use the rooms. The government subsequently said it tore out the wiring.

That same month, Pohl learned that the soundproofed courtroom at Guantanamo was wired with a “kill switch” that allowed an unknown government entity, thought to be the CIA, to cut audio feed of the trial to the public gallery. Pohl ruled that in the future only he could turn off the audio feed to protect classified information. But defense lawyers questioned whether the audio equipment in the courtroom had been manipulated to allow the government to monitor attorney- client conversations.

In the latest controversy, the prosecution gained access to about 540,000 e-mails from defense teams. It is not clear which cases or lawyers the e-mails concerned; a Pentagon spokesman declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

Defense attorneys said prosecutors told them that they stopped looking at the e-mails as soon as they realized that the messages contained confidential defense information.

The mishandling of the e-mails was detected when IT specialists were conducting a search of the government’s computer system on behalf of prosecutors in a particular case. When they did so, they came across not only the e-mails they were seeking but also those between defense lawyers.

Defense attorneys said military IT personnel unsuccessfully tried to refine their search parameters two more times — and in each case discovered more confidential defense material.

In another controversy, defense counsel recently complained that huge volumes of work files were lost when the Defense Department tried to upgrade its network and mirror at Guantanamo the computer system that is available to defense lawyers handling detainee cases in the Washington area.

“Entire files, months of work was just gone,” said Navy Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes, an attorney for Nashiri. “I have no evidence of any nefarious conduct, but it demonstrates again that we don’t have confidence that our files and communications are secure.”

Reyes noted that a prosecution file also was recently found in the defense computer system.

The latest delay in the commission hearings comes as the Obama administration faces a widening hunger strike among the detainees at Guantanamo.

Attorneys for the detainees and the military have clashed over the number of participants in the protest. The Pentagon said Thursday that 43 of the 166 detainees were on hunger strike, of whom 11 are being force-fed, while defense attorneys said the overwhelming majority of the 120 or so detainees in Camps 5 and 6 are on hunger strike.

The military has refused requests from the media, including The Washington Post, to allow reporters to observe conditions at the camps. Human Rights groups also have requested unfettered access to the camps.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross is visiting the camp, but the organization does not make its recommendations public.

ICRC President Peter Maurer said Thursday in an interview at The Post that the hunger strike is born of detainees’ frustration at being held indefinitely without any further review, even in cases in which they have been cleared for transfer out of Guantanamo.

U.S. tells N.Korea new missile launch would be "huge mistake"

Source

U.S. tells N.Korea new missile launch would be "huge mistake"

Arshad Mohammed and Jack Kim Reuters

10:11 a.m. CDT, April 12, 2013

SEOUL (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry warned North Korea on Friday it would be a "huge mistake" to test launch a medium-range missile and said the United States would never accept the reclusive country as a nuclear power.

Addressing reporters after talks with South Korea's president and leaders of the 28,000-strong U.S. military contingent in the country, Kerry also said it was up to China, North Korea's sole major ally, to "put some teeth" into efforts to press Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Kerry, like other U.S. officials, played down an assessment from the Pentagon's intelligence agency that the North already had a nuclear missile capacity.

The United States, he said, wanted to resume talks about North Korea's earlier pledges to halt its nuclear program.

But he also stressed that Washington would defend its allies in the region if necessary and pointedly said that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, "needs to understand, as I think he probably does, what the outcome of a conflict would be".

North Korea has repeatedly said it will not abandon nuclear weapons which it said on Friday were its "treasured" guarantor of security.

Kerry's visit coincided with preparations for Monday's anniversary of North Korean state founder Kim Il-Sung's birth date, a possible pretext for a show of strength, with speculation focusing on a possible new missile test launch.

Kerry, who flies to China on Saturday and to Japan on Sunday, said that if North Korea's 30-year-old leader went ahead with the launch, "he will be choosing, willfully, to ignore the entire international community".

"I would say ahead of time that it is a huge mistake for him to choose to do that because it will further isolate his country and further isolate his people, who frankly are desperate for food, not missile launches."

SHRILL RHETORIC

The North has issued weeks of shrill threats of an impending war following the imposition of U.N. sanctions in response to its third nuclear test in February. Kerry said the threats were "simply unacceptable" by any standard.

"We are all united in the fact that North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power," he said.

Kerry later told U.S. executives in Seoul that China, as an advocate of denuclearization, was in a position to press for a change in the North's policy.

"The reality is that if your policy is denuclearization and it is theirs as it is ours, as it is everybody's except the North at this moment ... if that's your policy, you've got to put some teeth into it," he told the gathering.

But North Korea showed little inclination for further talks.

Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers' Party, said Pyongyang would never abandon its nuclear program.

"The DPRK will hold tighter the treasured sword, nuclear weapons," it said, referring to the country by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

North Korean state television showed footage of newscasts from other countries depicting the trajectory a North Korean missile launch might take.

It also showed preparations for the Kim Il-Sung birthday festivities, including floral tributes, and a stadium of thousands of school children of the Korean Children's Union, each wearing a red scarf and saluting and marching in unison.

Speculation has mounted of an impending medium-range missile test launch in the North after reports in South Korea and the United States that as many as five medium-range missiles have been moved into position on the country's east coast.

Officials in both countries believe the North is preparing to test-launch a Musudan missile, whose range of 3,500 km (2,100 miles) or more would put Japan within striking distance and may threaten the island of Guam, which houses U.S. military bases.

The North has been angry about annual military drills between U.S. and South Korean forces, describing them as a "hostile" act. The United States dispatched B52 and B2 stealth bombers from their bases to take part.

Hours before Kerry's arrival, a U.S. lawmaker quoted a report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the 17 bodies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, as saying it had "moderate confidence" that North Korea had developed a nuclear bomb that could be fitted on a ballistic missile.

But Kerry poured cold water on the report said it was "inaccurate to suggest that the DPRK has fully tested, developed capabilities" as set down in the document.

South Korea's Defence Ministry said it did not believe North Korea could mount a nuclear warhead on a missile.

A U.S. official had earlier suggested that Washington's greatest concern was the possibility of unexpected developments linked to Kim Jong-un's "youth and inexperience". Asked if war seemed imminent, he replied: "Not at all."

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, meeting officials from her ruling Saenuri Party before her talks with Kerry, struck a conciliatory note by suggesting Seoul should at least listen to what North Korea had to say.

"We have a lot of issues, including the Kaesong industrial zone," local media quoted her as saying. So should we not meet with them and ask: "Just what are you trying to do?'"

The president was referring to North Korea's closure this week of the jointly run Kaesong industrial park, with the loss of 53,000 jobs.

Kerry said the United States would not object to the South talking to the North. He also did not rule out the possibility of U.S. aid some day flowing to the North, but suggested this could only happen if Pyongyang undertook real denuclearization.

Kerry sounded upbeat about resolving a dispute between the United States and South Korea over a civil nuclear cooperation agreement that expires next year, saying he thought a compromise could be found by Park's visit to Washington next month.

South Korea is believed to want the right to reprocess its spent nuclear fuel, which would allow it to deal with a mounting stockpile of nuclear waste.

However, this could also allow it to produce bomb-grade fissile material, a step Washington is loathe to see it take in part because of its nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea.

"We are ... very concerned at this time about not having any ingredients that could alter our approach ... to either of those," he said. But Kerry added that he was "confident that one option or another will be able to come to fruition (with South Korea) by the time that President Park comes to Washington."

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park in SEOUL, Sui-Lee Wee in BEIJING, John Ruwitch in SHANGHAI, and Patricia Zengerle, Mark Hosenball and Jeff Mason in WASHINGTON; Writing by Ronald Popeski and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

You get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!

The government views you as either an enemy that belongs in prison, or a source of cash with a big wallet they want to steal. And in both cases they ain't going to let a fair trial get in their way of putting you in prison and stealing your wallet.

Source

Guantanamo dogged by new controversy after mishandling of e-mails

By Peter Finn, Published: April 11

The military justice system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been dogged by charges of secret monitoring of proceedings and defense communications, became embroiled in a fresh controversy Thursday when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of defense e-mails were turned over to the prosecution.

The breach prompted Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel, to order all attorneys for Guantanamo detainees to stop using Defense Department computer networks to transmit privileged or confidential information until the security of such communications is assured.

Army Col. James Pohl, the chief judge at Guantanamo, also ordered a two-month delay in pre­trial proceedings in the military-commission case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of organizing the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Defense attorneys in the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed , the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-defendants filed an emergency motion — via a handwritten note — seeking a similar pause in proceedings.

Pretrial hearings in both cases were set to resume this month.

“Is there any security for defense attorney information?” said James Connell, attorney for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, one of the Sept. 11 defendants. “This new disclosure is simply the latest in a series of revelations of courtroom monitoring, hidden surveillance devices and legal-bin searches.”

The inappropriate transfer of the e-mails follows other questions about government intrusion and secrecy that have undermined the legitimacy of a judicial process that has struggled to establish itself as an effective forum for the prosecution of some terrorism cases.

In February, a military lawyer acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside devices that looked like smoke detectors in rooms used for meetings between defense counsel and their clients. The military said the listening system was not used to eavesdrop on confidential meetings and had been installed before defense lawyers started to use the rooms. The government subsequently said it tore out the wiring.

That same month, Pohl learned that the soundproofed courtroom at Guantanamo was wired with a “kill switch” that allowed an unknown government entity, thought to be the CIA, to cut audio feed of the trial to the public gallery. Pohl ruled that in the future only he could turn off the audio feed to protect classified information. But defense lawyers questioned whether the audio equipment in the courtroom had been manipulated to allow the government to monitor attorney- client conversations.

In the latest controversy, the prosecution gained access to about 540,000 e-mails from defense teams. It is not clear which cases or lawyers the e-mails concerned; a Pentagon spokesman declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

Defense attorneys said prosecutors told them that they stopped looking at the e-mails as soon as they realized that the messages contained confidential defense information.

The mishandling of the e-mails was detected when IT specialists were conducting a search of the government’s computer system on behalf of prosecutors in a particular case. When they did so, they came across not only the e-mails they were seeking but also those between defense lawyers.

Defense attorneys said military IT personnel unsuccessfully tried to refine their search parameters two more times — and in each case discovered more confidential defense material.

In another controversy, defense counsel recently complained that huge volumes of work files were lost when the Defense Department tried to upgrade its network and mirror at Guantanamo the computer system that is available to defense lawyers handling detainee cases in the Washington area.

“Entire files, months of work was just gone,” said Navy Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes, an attorney for Nashiri. “I have no evidence of any nefarious conduct, but it demonstrates again that we don’t have confidence that our files and communications are secure.”

Reyes noted that a prosecution file also was recently found in the defense computer system.

The latest delay in the commission hearings comes as the Obama administration faces a widening hunger strike among the detainees at Guantanamo.

Attorneys for the detainees and the military have clashed over the number of participants in the protest. The Pentagon said Thursday that 43 of the 166 detainees were on hunger strike, of whom 11 are being force-fed, while defense attorneys said the overwhelming majority of the 120 or so detainees in Camps 5 and 6 are on hunger strike.

The military has refused requests from the media, including The Washington Post, to allow reporters to observe conditions at the camps. Human Rights groups also have requested unfettered access to the camps.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross is visiting the camp, but the organization does not make its recommendations public.

ICRC President Peter Maurer said Thursday in an interview at The Post that the hunger strike is born of detainees’ frustration at being held indefinitely without any further review, even in cases in which they have been cleared for transfer out of Guantanamo.

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court

Let's face it, it's not about the kids. It's about high paying, cushy jobs for cops.

Well at least that is probably how the cops and police unions feel about it.

Source

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: April 12, 2013 175 Comments

HOUSTON — As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

Last week, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a task force of the National Rifle Association recommended placing police officers or other armed guards in every school. The White House has proposed an increase in police officers based in schools.

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun.

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.

Such criminal charges may be most prevalent in Texas, where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year, said Deborah Fowler, the deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a legal advocacy center in Austin. The students seldom get legal aid, she noted, and they may face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service and, in some cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs or the military.

In February, Texas Appleseed and the Brazos County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. filed a complaint with the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Black students in the school district in Bryan, they noted, receive criminal misdemeanor citations at four times the rate of white students.

Featured in the complaint is De’Angelo Rollins, who was 12 and had just started at a Bryan middle school in 2010 when he and another boy scuffled and were given citations. After repeated court appearances, De’Angelo pleaded no contest, paid a fine of $69 and was sentenced to 20 hours of community service and four months’ probation.

“They said this will stay on his record unless we go back when he is 17 and get it expunged,” said his mother, Marjorie Holmon.

Federal officials have not yet acted, but the district says it is revising guidelines for citations. “Allegations of inequitable treatment of students is something the district takes very seriously,” said Sandra Farris, a spokeswoman for the Bryan schools.

While schools may bring in police officers to provide security, the officers often end up handling discipline and handing out charges of disorderly conduct or assault, said Michael Nash, the presiding judge of juvenile court in Los Angeles and the president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

“You have to differentiate the security issue and the discipline issue,” he said. “Once the kids get involved in the court system, it’s a slippery slope downhill.”

Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, defended placing police officers in schools, provided that they are properly trained. He said that the negative impacts had been exaggerated, and that when the right people were selected and schooled in adolescent psychology and mediation, both schools and communities benefited.

“The good officers recognize the difference between a scuffle and a true assault,” Mr. Canady said.

But the line is not always clear. In New York, a lawsuit against the Police Department’s School Safety Division describes several instances in which officers handcuffed and arrested children for noncriminal behavior.

Many districts are clamoring for police officers. “There’s definitely a massive trend toward increasing school resource officers, so much so that departments are having trouble buying guns and supplies,” said Michael Dorn, director of Safe Havens International, in Macon, Ga., a safety consultant to schools.

One district in Florida, Mr. Dorn said, is looking to add 130 officers, mainly to patrol its grade schools. McKinney, Tex., north of Dallas, recently placed officers in its five middle schools.

Many judges say school police officers are too quick to make arrests or write tickets.

“We are criminalizing our children for nonviolent offenses,” Wallace B. Jefferson, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, said in a speech to the Legislature in March.

School officers in Texas are authorized to issue Class C misdemeanor citations, which require students to appear before a justice of the peace or in municipal court, with public records.

The process can leave a bitter taste. Joshua, a ninth grader who lives south of Houston, got into a brief fight on a school bus in November after another boy, a security video showed, hit him first. The principal called in the school’s resident sheriff, who wrote them both up for disorderly conduct.

“I thought it was stupid,” Joshua said of the ticket and his need to miss school for two court appearances. His guardian found a free lawyer from the Earl Carl Institute, a legal aid group at Texas Southern University, and the case was eventually dismissed.

Sarah R. Guidry, the executive director of the institute, said that when students appeared in court with a lawyer, charges for minor offenses were often dismissed. But she said the courts tended to be “plea mills,” with students pleading guilty in the hope that, once they paid a fine and spent hours cleaning parks, the charges would be expunged. If students fail to show up and cases are unresolved, they may be named in arrest warrants when they turn 17.

In parts of Texas, the outcry from legal advocates is starting to make a difference. Jimmy L. Dotson, the chief of Houston’s 186-member school district force, is one of several police leaders working to redefine the role of campus officers.

Perhaps the sharpest change has come to E. L. Furr High School, which serves mainly low-income Hispanic children on the city’s east side. Bertie Simmons, 79, came out of retirement 11 years ago to try to turn around a school so blighted by gang violence that it dared not hold assemblies.

“The kids hated the school police,” said Ms. Simmons, the principal. They arrested two or three students a day and issued tickets to many more.

Ms. Simmons searched for officers who would work with the students and build trust. She found them in Danny Avalos and Craig Davis, former municipal police officers who grew up in rough neighborhoods, and after years of effort, the campus is peaceful and arrests and tickets are rare. Discipline is usually enforced by a principal’s court with student juries, not summonses to the criminal courts.

“Writing tickets is easy,” Officer Avalos said. “We do it the hard way, talking with the kids and coaching them.”

With new guidelines and training, ticketing within the Houston schools was reduced by 60 percent in one year. Citations for “disruption of classes,” for example, fell to 124 between September and February, from 927 in the same period last year.

“Our role is not to be disciplinarians,” Chief Dotson said in an interview. “Our purpose is to push these kids into college, not into the criminal justice system.”

Government rulers all talk, no action on public records.

Arizona's public records laws, or freedom of information act which is A.R.S 39 §121 requires government bureaucrats and elected officials to answer all requests for public records as quickly as possible. That's the good news.

The bad news is there is no criminal or civil penalties for government bureaucrats and elected officials who refuse to obey the law.

And you can't call the cops to enforce the public records law. The only way you can do that is for YOU to sue the bureaucrat who refused to honor your request for public records.

And the Arizona's public records law doesn't even guarantee that your expenses for suing will be covered. It says "The court MAY award attorney fees and other legal costs"

Source

San Jose fights disclosure of email, text message records

By John Woolfolk

jwoolfolk@mercurynews.com

Posted: 04/12/2013 06:21:01 AM PDT

SAN JOSE -- San Jose drew praise for its progressive approach to open government in the digital age by adopting a policy three years ago making elected officials' personal email and text messages about city business public records subject to disclosure.

But the City Council this week voted unanimously to appeal a judge's ruling last month that effectively applies that policy to the whole city workforce by declaring government employees' communications about public business subject to the California Public Records Act whether on official or private devices.

The case sets up a showdown that will be watched statewide and beyond over what open-government advocates say has become a gaping hole in public records law that was written in the typewriter era and didn't contemplate officials with Gmail, Facebook and iPhones. And they say, bring it on.

"I'm glad the city is appealing the ruling, since it is likely to be affirmed on appeal," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition in San Rafael. "That will force all California cities and counties to treat emails about government business as public records, regardless of the status or ownership of the email accounts or devices. What matters is the substance of the message -- is it about government business or is it purely personal? -- not the technology."

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who ran as an open-government champion, had made the same argument in 2010 when he pushed a policy that would require disclosure of messages about city business sent or received by the mayor, council members and their staffs whether they were communicated on personal or city phones and networks. The City Council approved the policy unanimously in March 2010 on a trial basis and, citing no problems since, made it permanent in December.

Scheer said at the time the council adopted the policy that he knew of no other city that had gone so far in updating public records policy to account for modern technology. Most cities have fought efforts to force disclosure of officials' messages on private networks, citing both privacy concerns and practical questions of how a government could search for relevant documents and messages on phones and email networks it doesn't control.

Reed said that such disclosure rules covering private devices and networks can be justified and managed on a small scale involving a few dozen elected officials and their staffs. But he said the council appealed out of concern that applying those rules throughout a city organization of 5,500 full-time employees -- the practical effect of a decision that personal emails are subject to the California Public Records Act -- would be invasive and burdensome.

"It's about the scope of it," Reed said. "I think it's too broad. It sets up practical problems."

The case originated in June 2009 when activist Ted Smith requested voice mails, text messages, and emails sent or received by the mayor and council members related to a downtown redevelopment project in San Jose, whether on official or personal networks and devices. He sued in August that year when the city claimed it lacked authority to access any records on officials' private personal accounts.

Last month, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled in Smith's favor, stating that under the city's interpretation of public records law, "a public agency could easily shield information from public disclosure simply by storing it on equipment it does not technically own."

"Regardless of where a record is retained, if it is drafted by a public official," Kleinberg wrote, it "constitutes a 'public record.' "

Scheer said that while the practical and privacy concerns cities have raised are legitimate, they can easily be overcome by requiring public officials to copy messages about public business to their official email where the city can search for and retrieve it.

In the city's petition with the Sixth District Court of Appeal, San Jose argues that the council disclosure policy for private email and phone networks is irrelevant to Smith's case because it was adopted 10 months after his records request and was not retroactive. The city added that "local policies simply do not affect the courts' interpretation of the Public Records Act," and that the council had chosen to limit its policy to affect about 30 city employees.

But San Jose also advanced arguments that seemingly conflict with the policy that the council adopted for itself.

"A council member is not a governmental entity," San Jose's appellate filing stated. "A council member is an individual public official with no authority to act alone on behalf of the city. Consequently, emails and documents found on a council member's personal computer or personal electronic device do not fall within the definition of a public record because any record personally and individually created by a council member is not a documentation of a transaction or activity of the city as a local agency."

Contact John Woolfolk at 408-975-9346. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/johnwoolfolk1.

We need answers in Border Patrol murders???

But Linda Valdez is very naive expecting the cops to arrest and jail one of their own buddies for murder. It ain't going to happen.

I have posted 100's of articles on other police crimes and the police routinely do get away with murder and they rarely get more then a slap on the wrist, if that much for their crimes.

The crime I vividly remember happened around November, 2004 when a News 12 helicopter caught some Phoenix Police beating up a Mexican they arrested for hijacking a car. They had the evidence they needed to nail those crooked Phoenix cops on tape, but I believe Rick Romney who was then Maricopa County attorney decided not to press charges. See News 12 video tapes Phoenix Police beating and Assault by police claimed

Yes, the Mexican who hijacked the car was a criminal. But so were the Phoenix Police officers who beat him up for his crime.

And of course we have Sheriff Joe's goons who routinely murder innocent people in his tent city gulag. Yes, Maricopa County has paid millions in out of court settlements for those murders, but I don't think the police criminals that committed the murders have received anything more then a slap on the wrist and a stern warning not to do it again [well except to criminals who deserve it, like the people they murdered - and that's from Sheriff Joe, not me]

Source

Linda Valdez

Posted on April 11, 2013 10:13 am by Linda Valdez

We need answers in Border Patrol killing

The Border Patrol is a fast growing national police force whose power and secrecy should worry civil libertarians.

After six months, the public that funds this national police force doesn’t even know the identity of the agent or agents involved in killing a youth in Nogales, Mexico, with a barrage of bullets fired across the border.

It smacks of cover-up. [Smacks??? It IS a COVER-UP!!!]

Can you imagine the outrage if Mexican police had gunned down an American youth with equal gusto?

Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, was shot numerous times — and as many as 11 bullets hit him from behind.

The Border Patrol alleges he was throwing rocks at them – an activity that the distance and angle of the border fence would have made more futile than threatening.

A witness has come forward, according to reporting by the Republic’s Bob Ortega, to say Elena Rodriguez was not throwing rocks.

Does anybody know for sure?

After six months, does anybody believe the FBI investigation hasn’t found some answers? If that’s the case, somebody send the FBI some coffee. They need to get moving.

Or are they – and Homeland Security — just hoping the whole thing blows over?

Protests yesterday at the border show that this is not going to go away. Nor should it.

The Border Patrol has extraordinary power, and there have been other deadly encounters where rocks were met with bullets.

According to Ortega:

“There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.”

We need answers. We need them now. [I agree with you Linda, but it ain't going to happen]

Those who paint dystopian scenarios about an out-of-control national government threatening civil liberties are often the same people who demand tougher border security. They ought to be careful what they ask for.

The Border Patrol needs to be accountable. Not secretive. [Again it ain't going to happen. This is why we need the Second Amendment. When the government becomes tyrannical and the police and elected officials are above the law the only way to fix things is with armed citizens physically ousting the government tyrants]

Greeted with chocolates and flowers???

Source

Scorpions are always happy to see you coming

Today’s question:

We’ve lived in our house since December 1978, and never saw a scorpion until the last several years. Now they appear fairly frequently. I had always heard that once the former farmland was “paved over,” scorpions moved on.

Assuming someone were stung, after regular office hours for his/her doctor, where should they go for treatment? Should it be a hospital emergency room, or would one of the urgent care facilities be OK?

First of all, when swaths of desert or farmland are turned into housing developments, much of the native flora and fauna is lost or has to move on.

Not scorpions. Scorpions love you. They welcome you with open pincers. If they could, they would greet you with chocolates and flowers, in much the same way we were told our troops would be greeted when they arrived in Iraq. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Anyway, when their stomping grounds give way to housing, scorpion populations tend to rise.

That’s because we bring them pretty much everything they need. Water, for starters. Lights that attract the bugs they eat. Shelter in the form of a woodpile or storage shed, or even a wet towel left out by the swimming pool.

The scorpions really couldn’t be happier.

As to what to do if you get a scorpion sting, that’s kind of up to you and depends on your general state of health. You might get by with some ice and antihistamines, but to be on the safe side you probably should either call your doctor or go to the emergency room.

Opium Production in Afghanistan Increases for Third Year

Of course don't count on that happening, because the "war on drugs" is a jobs program for millions of overpaid and under worked cops who pretty much have the political clout to prevent the war on drugs from ending.

Source

Opium Production in Afghanistan Increases for Third Year

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: April 15, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — For the third year in a row, opium cultivation has increased across Afghanistan, reversing earlier drops stemming from a decade-long international and Afghan government effort to combat the drug trade, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.

The report’s findings raised concerns among international law enforcement officials that if the trend continued, opium would be the country’s major economic activity after the departure of foreign military forces in 2014, leading to the specter of what one referred to as “the world’s first true narco-state.”

Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and last year accounted for 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. “The assumption is it will reach again to 90 percent this year,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations’ top counternarcotics official here.

The report, the Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment 2013, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and based on extensive surveys, found that opium cultivation has increased in 12 of the country’s 34 provinces. Herat, in western Afghanistan, is the only province in which cultivation is expected to decrease, the report said.

The report suggests that Taliban insurgents took advantage of insecurity in several provinces to assist opium farmers and win over popular support — plus protecting an important form of income for their operations. Opium cultivation has increased most wherever there has been insecurity.

Over all, the number of acres devoted this year to opium poppy cultivation is expected to top the figure in 2008, when poppy plantings reached a peak of 388,000 acres, Mr. Lemahieu said. After 2008, eradication efforts, as well as a cash incentive program for provinces that eradicatedopium poppy crops, helped reduce cultivation dramatically through 2010.

This year three provinces — Balkh, Faryab and Takhar in the north and west — are in danger of losing their poppy-free status, according to the United Nations. report. They are among 16 provinces that had been declared poppy-free; such provinces receive $1 million awards from the American Embassy, paid directly to the governor’s office.

In February, the State Department announced that it was handing out $18.2 million in Good Performers Initiative Awards for reducing poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. There was no immediate response from American Embassy officials on how the program would be affected by the new United Nations data.

Opium production has become particularly high in Helmand Province in the south, the country’s major opium-producing area, and in Kandahar Province. In both places, the surge of American troops helped to beat back Taliban influence, but as those troops returned home last year, cultivation increased dramatically. More than 70 percent of opium production now takes place in three provinces where the surge occurred.

“This country is on its way to becoming the world’s first true narco-state,” said one international law enforcement official, who did not want to be quoted criticizing the Afghan government. “The opium trade is a much bigger part of the economy already than narcotics ever were in Bolivia or Colombia.”

But Mirwais Yasini, former head of counternarcotics for the Afghan government and now a prominent member of Parliament, said, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But if it goes on like this in the future, I am worried about that happening,” he said.

Mr. Yasini said eradication efforts had been countered by insecurity, compounded by corruption at local, provincial and national levels. “I don’t see anything tangible that has been done; there is no meaningful crop substitution and no effective enforcement,” he said.

The United Nations has estimated in the past that opium trafficking makes up 15 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, a figure that is expected to rise as international military and development spending declines with the NATO withdrawal at the end of 2014.

The mining sector, the other big hope of economic self-sufficiency for Afghanistan, is still moribund as the Afghan Parliament continues to bicker over a mining law, and lack of security and legal clarity has prevented the large-scale exploitation of mineral resources.

The increase in opium poppy cultivation is attributed mainly to historically high prices for opium, coupled with insecurity. Prices began rising dramatically in 2010 when a poppy blight severely reduced crop yields, but they have remained high since. Farmers earn as much as $203 a kilogram for harvested opium, compared to only 43 cents a kilogram for wheat or $1.25 for rice, according to the report.

Mr. Lemahieu praised efforts of the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics, but said international donors had greatly underfunded key programs to combat trafficking, with only $300,000 of a requested $11 million pledged this year.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the proportion of Afghanistan’s opium production that comes from three provinces where the “surge” of extra American troops were deployed to beat back the Taliban. It is more than 70 percent, not more than one-third.

Cops read everything you post online???

This Chicago teenager was busted for the victimless crime of posting a Craigslist ad selling his pet alligator.

I also posted articles before about Phoenix and Tempe cops who work full time posting internet ads posing as hot, horny, underage teenager girls looking for old men to have sex with.

On these web pages I get at least one visit everyday from a site in the Washington D.C. area (IP address 76.114.145.234 located in Shady Side, Maryland), which appears to be a Homeland Security office that is spying on me for my posts documenting crimes committed by the police.

The site that logs the visits was broken into several times, by I suspect police with the Homeland Security, or perhaps hackers hired by the Homeland Security and they modified the logging software.

Sadly only 30 years after 1984, America is beginning to look like the police state written in the novel 1984.

Source

Police: Galewood neighborhood man tries to sell alligator on Craigslist

By Rosemary Regina Sobol Tribune reporter

2:30 a.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A Northwest Side man accused of trying to sell a baby alligator on Craigslist for $300 was arrested Monday evening, police said.

Juan A. DeJesus, 19, of the 1700 block of Meade Avenue, was charged Monday with one count of misdemeanor possession of wildlife, police said.

A state Department of Natural Resources police officer responded to an advertisement that was posted on Craigslist and went to DeJesus' home Monday afternoon under the pretenses he was going to purchase the alligator, police said.

The ad, which has since been pulled from Craigslist, stated:

"Baby gator for sale, id consider a trade for a leachie gecko. Sale price is 300 obo asap."

DeJesus came out of his home with the alligator and said he would like to have $300 for it, but the officer identified himself and told DeJesus of the violation, police said.

The alligator was seized as evidence and given to other IDNR agents and DeJesus was transported to the Grand Central District police station to be processed, police said.

DeJesus could not be reached immediately Tuesday morning. He is scheduled to appear in court at the Daley Center on May 31.

rsobol@tribune.com

Tempe prosecutor Kathy Matz arrested for domestic violence

Source

Tempe assistant prosecutor, boyfriend held in assaulting each other

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:08 PM

A Tempe assistant city prosecutor and her live-in boyfriend were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of assaulting each other, according to Tempe police.

Kathy Matz and Keith Walls were arrested late Wednesday night at the Tempe home they shared and transported to the city jail, according to a police report. Both had been drinking, police said.

Each posted a $500 bail Thursday, police spokesman Michael Pooley said.

Police arrived at the home at about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday after Matz called 911.

According to the report, Walls and Matz were on the bed, watching television when he asked Matz to move over. When he returned from the bathroom, she still had not moved and as he laid down in bed, she told him to get out and sleep on the couch, the report said.

Walls told police he refused and when he sat up in bed, Matz punched him in the back of his head.

They both got out of bed and Matz began shouting obscenities and swinging her closed fists at him, hitting him in the eye and kneeing him in the groin, he said.

Walls said he then threw water on Matz from a cup before he walked out of the room and proceeded to pack his clothes.

Matz told police that Walls was upset with her being on his side of the bed and he began to push her off the bed causing her to fall to the floor.

The report said Matz told police that Walls also threatened to shoot her with her gun that she kept under her side of the bed. She then pushed Walls away from her and he picked up a plastic cup of water and threw it at her, hitting her in the eye, the report said.

Police found no visible injuries on Matz when they arrived, but doctors found a bruise on the back of her head that she claimed was from hitting the headboard when she was being assaulted by Walls, according to the report. Doctors were unable to determine when she received the contusion and she never told officers on scene about the injury, police

Matz also complained that Walls gave her two bruises to her left wrist when he grabbed her. But police said they were unable to determine when she received the injuries and she did not tell officers on scene about the bruises.

Walls had a small bruise under his right eye, according to the report.

Matz will be placed on paid administrative leave while the matter is reviewed under the city’s Personnel Rules and Regulations, according to the city spokeswoman Nikki Ripley.

Her case will be transferred to a different jurisdiction in Maricopa County, she said.

Matz has worked for the city since 1998 in a number of roles, including city clerk and assistant to former Mayor Neil Giuliano, Ripley said. Her current salary is $115,045 and she is one of seven prosecutors on the city staff.

Both Walls and Matz told police they would not aid in the prosecution. Walls told police that he just wanted the relationship to be over.

Tempe prosecutor Kathy Matz arrested for assault

Source

Tempe assistant prosecutor, boyfriend held in assaulting each other

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:08 PM

A Tempe assistant city prosecutor and her live-in boyfriend were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of assaulting each other, according to Tempe police.

Kathy Matz and Keith Walls were arrested late Wednesday night at the Tempe home they shared and transported to the city jail, according to a police report. Both had been drinking, police said.

Each posted a $500 bail Thursday, police spokesman Michael Pooley said.

Police arrived at the home at about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday after Matz called 911.

According to the report, Walls and Matz were on the bed, watching television when he asked Matz to move over. When he returned from the bathroom, she still had not moved and as he laid down in bed, she told him to get out and sleep on the couch, the report said.

Walls told police he refused and when he sat up in bed, Matz punched him in the back of his head.

They both got out of bed and Matz began shouting obscenities and swinging her closed fists at him, hitting him in the eye and kneeing him in the groin, he said.

Walls said he then threw water on Matz from a cup before he walked out of the room and proceeded to pack his clothes.

Matz told police that Walls was upset with her being on his side of the bed and he began to push her off the bed causing her to fall to the floor.

The report said Matz told police that Walls also threatened to shoot her with her gun that she kept under her side of the bed. She then pushed Walls away from her and he picked up a plastic cup of water and threw it at her, hitting her in the eye, the report said.

Police found no visible injuries on Matz when they arrived, but doctors found a bruise on the back of her head that she claimed was from hitting the headboard when she was being assaulted by Walls, according to the report. Doctors were unable to determine when she received the contusion and she never told officers on scene about the injury, police

Matz also complained that Walls gave her two bruises to her left wrist when he grabbed her. But police said they were unable to determine when she received the injuries and she did not tell officers on scene about the bruises.

Walls had a small bruise under his right eye, according to the report.

Matz will be placed on paid administrative leave while the matter is reviewed under the city’s Personnel Rules and Regulations, according to the city spokeswoman Nikki Ripley.

Her case will be transferred to a different jurisdiction in Maricopa County, she said.

Matz has worked for the city since 1998 in a number of roles, including city clerk and assistant to former Mayor Neil Giuliano, Ripley said. Her current salary is $115,045 and she is one of seven prosecutors on the city staff.

Both Walls and Matz told police they would not aid in the prosecution. Walls told police that he just wanted the relationship to be over.

Pressure cooker bombs common in South Asia

Pressure cooker bombs common in South Asia

By Alex Rodriguez

April 17, 2013, 7:16 a.m.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani militants rely on a wide array of explosive devices to terrorize the South Asian nation, from suicide bomb vests and car bombs to rocket-propelled grenades.

But within that arsenal, pressure cooker bombs such as the ones probably used in the attack on the Boston Marathon on Monday are a mainstay, accounting for roughly half of the explosive devices defused in the country’s volatile northwest, a top Pakistani bomb disposal squad official says.

“We are defusing pressure cooker bombs almost daily,” said Shafqat Malik, chief of the bomb disposal squad for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, which includes the violence-wracked city of Peshawar, Swat Valley and Pakistan’s militant-ridden tribal areas along the Afghan border. “They’re very common. Pressure cookers are one of the favorite IED containers for the terrorist groups.”

Since Malik began leading the province’s bomb squad in 2009, his officers have defused more than 5,000 explosive devices — roughly half of which have been pressure cooker bombs, he said. This year alone, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province bomb disposal technicians have defused about 125 bombs that have been contained in pressure cookers, he said.

The most recent prominent attack involving such an explosive occurred Sunday in the Swat Valley town of Banjot. Mukarram Shah, a member of the secular Awami National Party (ANP), was killed when a pressure cooker bomb planted near his car exploded.

The ANP, a longtime ally of President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party and the dominant political party in Pakistan’s northwest, has been rocked by a wave of terror attacks against its leaders and candidates ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for May 11.

On Tuesday, a suicide bomber killed 16 people and injured 50 others at a late night ANP election meeting in Peshawar. One of ANP’s most prominent leaders, Ghulam Bilour, was at the meeting but survived the attack.

The Pakistani Taliban, the Al Qaeda-allied militant group responsible for the majority of suicide bombings and other acts of terror in Pakistan over the last five years, claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s blast, as well as several other attacks on ANP leaders and officials in recent weeks. It has also vowed to target members of two other secular parties, Zardari’s party and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which governs the country’s largest city and its commercial capital, Karachi.

Pakistani Taliban militants rely heavily on pressure cooker bombs, Malik said. because they allow pressure to build up inside the steel before the blast occurs, creating a more intense explosion.

“Blast waves don’t escape suddenly — the pressure builds up before the cooker gets broken,” Malik said. “So the effect can be more lethal compared to other kinds of containers. The pieces of the cooker move outward like projectiles, hitting the target like a bullet.”

A drawback to pressure cooker bombs, Malik says, is that the blast radius is reduced because a significant portion of the energy generated by the explosive agent is expended in the break-up of the cooker’s thick steel walls.

The blast radius of a pressure cooker bomb depends on a variety of factors, including the size of the cooker. But typically, the area in which a pressure cooker bomb can cause lethal injuries is about 27 yards, Malik said.

Other improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, can disperse shrapnel over a greater distance.

Pakistani militants often detonate pressure cooker bombs by remote control — with a cellphone, for example — and usually bury the devices in the ground, Malik said.

Only police officers can be trusted to handle guns properly!!!!

Retired cop drops gun, shoots self at Des Plaines school

By Jonathan Bullington Tribune reporters

8:18 p.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A retired police officer accidentally shot himself when he dropped his gun inside a Des Plaines school while attending his grandson's Boy Scout troop meeting.

Police and school officials said the man was carrying his licensed, loaded gun inside a fanny pack Monday evening at Iroquois School, and that the gun went off and a bullet struck him in the leg after he dropped the pack.

The man, who school officials called a troop leader, was taken to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Des Plaines police Chief William Kushner said the man is a retired Chicago police officer.

No one else was injured, and police did not file charges because no laws were broken, Kushner said.

The retired officer is licensed to carry the firearm, according to a letter to the school community from Iroquois Principal Michael Amadei.

"Of course, the district does not condone bringing firearms on school grounds," the letter states.

Kushner said he initially heard that the retired officer was in serious condition, but school officials said the man's injuries were "not as serious as anticipated."

Amadei's letter said the school "will continue to work with" police and Scouting officials "to clarify any questions that arise. ... Student safety is our number one priority."

Representatives of the Boy Scouts of America Northwest Suburban Council could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

Tribune reporter Robert McCoppin contributed.

jbullington@tribune.com

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema gets $333,000 in campaign contributions

OK, they are not bribes, they officially are campaign contributions, but for the man on the street it's hard to see the difference.

And of course people who give suitcases full of money to Congressmen, expect something in return for their cash.

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema recently sponsored a $5 billion dollar corporate welfare program for corporations which make solar cells. I am sure she will say it wasn't a result of the campaign contributions she receive from the solar industry. But the rest of us have our questions.

Last but not least Kyrsten Sinema when she was a member of the Arizona State Legislator sponsored a bill which would have slapped a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush the will of the people down the toilet who voted for Prop 203 which legalized medical marijuana in Arizona.

Source

Sinema, Barber flex fundraising muscle

By Ronald J. Hansen and Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 17, 2013 3:51 PM

Though she is only a freshman on Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has quickly established herself as one of the more prolific fundraisers in Congress.

Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat, collected $333,000 between January and March and ranked 55th among all incumbents in the House. Her haul wasn’t far behind the $345,000 raised by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Posting an impressive fundraising total in the beginning of an off-election year could help Sinema ward off potential challengers to her toss-up seat — or at least intimidate them. Two fellow Arizona Democrats, Reps. Ron Barber of southern Arizona and Ann Kirkpatrick of northern Arizona, were close behind in total fundraising, reflecting the importance of campaign cash for the three incumbents who took narrow victories last year.

Barber raised $297,000 and Kirkpatrick $314,000.

By contrast, Reps. Trent Franks of Glendale and Paul Gosar of Prescott, two Republicans holding among the safest conservative seats in the country, raised less than $100,000 combined. Both ranked near the bottom of fundraisers among incumbents, Federal Election Commission records show.

“The first quarter fundraising shows that Kirkpatrick, Barber and Sinema are taking their re-elections seriously,” said Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report, based in Washington, D.C. “If you raise a lot of money early, it does give challengers pause. But I don’t think at this early stage potential challengers look at a fundraising number and think, ‘It’s too big, and there’s not enough time to get there.’ ”

“By the time we get to next summer and fall,” Gonzales added, when the election cycle will be at its peak, “both sides will be dumping money in.”

Among potential challengers to Sinema, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wendy Rogers, a Tempe Republican, raised $103,000 in the first quarter. Rogers’ total was among the highest in the country among non-incumbents. Sinema represents parts of Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Paradise Valley and Scottsdale.

Rogers, who has begun sending e-mails touting her campaign bid, ran in the district last year, as did Vernon Parker and Martin Sepulveda. Parker, who won the Republican primary and lost to Sinema in November, raised $11,000. Sepulveda took in 70 cents.

Republicans in Barber’s district appear to be pinning their hopes on retired Air Force Col. Martha McSally. Barber barely scraped by her in November, but easily raised more cash than McSally in the first quarter. McSally reported $8,400 in contributions, half of which came from a Georgia-based GOP PAC.

Barber’s district includes part of Tucson and all of Cochise County near the U.S.-Mexico border.

In recent months, McSally has appeared on national news shows, sent out e-mails from her campaign account and visited political groups in the district, sending signals that she will run again, but she has declined to make it official.

“If we see a couple more quarters from McSally with that showing, there will be concern on the Republican side,” Gonzales said. But “for someone like McSally who just got off the campaign trail, I think there’s usually a natural pause before getting things ramped up again.”

Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat, raised $75,000; Rep. Ed Pastor, a Democrat, raised $90,000; Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican, raised $94,000; and Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican, raised $172,000.

Senate filings were not yet available.

Most Glendale tax dollars go to the POLICE!!!!

That is followed by the fire department which gets 22 percent of the budget.

And all other departments combined share the remaining 37 percent of the budget.

They had a second graph that showed the number of Glendale police employees was 550, the number of fire department employees was 250. All the other city employees on the graph were 500. So the police and fire departments have more employees then all the other departments combined.

Those numbers are typical for other city budgets I have seen and the money spent on the cops is usually twice as much at the fire department, and that the police and fire departments budgets are always more then that of all the other city departments combined.

Which leads me to say that America cities are police states because most of the money is spent on the police.

The sad part is that most of the arrests the police make are for victimless drug war crimes. I have read that at the Federal level two thirds of the people in prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I am not sure what percent of people in state prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes, but I suspect it is also a huge number.

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

By Paul Giblin The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 17, 2013 8:59 AM

The mostly new Glendale City Council is contending with a mostly old problem. The city’s financial position has been on a downward slope for years.

In an effort to offset declines in tax revenues, the state’s fifth-largest city has nearly chewed through its financial reserves while it has shed employees and cut services.

Yet, according to the city’s projections, its financial position is about to get far worse.

According to current forecasts, the city will have $3.4 million in reserve in the general fund at the end of fiscal 2014. Without serious restructuring, by 2015 the city would be $3.8 million in the red, and by 2018, the city would have a $20.3 million shortfall.

One option city bookkeepers recommend is to make $3.5 million in cuts for the fiscal year opening in July, followed by $10.8 million in reductions for 2015, and an additional $8.2 million in cuts in 2018.

The seven-member council, with its four new members, is trying to determine how to shape a budget that will keep enough police on patrol and parks in good repair.

But those goals seemed to border on unachievable during an opening series of budget workshops in recent weeks.

If all goes as scheduled, the council will offer a draft of the 2014 budget and a 10-year capital-improvement plan May 28, then authorize a final budget June 11.

Glendale’s financial experts project the city to finish the current fiscal year with an $11.4 million reserve in the general fund.

Ending with any savings, or a reserve, in 2014 requires $3.5 million in reduced spending that would be accomplished by eliminating vacant positions and related costs, Financial Services Executive Director Sherry Schurhammer told the council.

With those cuts and deeper ones recommended by staff, the city could build its reserve to nearly $20 million by fiscal 2018.

Without changes, the city’s financial position is set to become particularly grim in 2018, because that year marks the first year without revenue from a current, but temporary sales tax.

“What I want to make clear here — or hope I’m making clear — is that this ongoing structural operating deficit exists even if that sales tax does not sunset, because you’ve got this negative fund balance,” she said March 27.

The general fund is important because it’s the city’s largest operating fund and it supports the widest range of programs, she said.

The city’s financial position is headed downward because municipal spending patterns were based on prerecession tax collections, and spending was not reduced enough to keep pace as tax collections tapered off during the recession, Schurhammer said.

Most city departments have reduced spending by letting vacant positions remain unfilled in recent years, but those efforts aren’t enough to balance the books, she said.

The heads of most municipal departments told council members that staffing cuts already have cut into their programs.

Acting Police Chief Debby Black and Fire Chief Mark Burdick told council members that they have run out of ways to cover the staffing cuts by adjusting employees’ work schedules and assignments. Both departments need more employees, they said.

Likewise, the number of positions in the Community and Economic Development Department has fallen from 78.5 in 2009 to 39.8 this year, according to city records. Projections call for the department to lose three more positions next year.

Yet the city’s economic development officials are handling more business prospects than they have in years, Executive Director Brian Friedman said.

In addition to anticipated budget expenses across the city, council members are expected to consider an array of new expenses in coming weeks. Among them:

Payments to the potential new owners of the Phoenix Coyotes or a separate management firm to operate Jobing.com Arena. Next year’s budget assumes the city could pay an arena manager $6.5 million.

Funding air-traffic controllers at Glendale Municipal Airport beginning in June when the federal government discontinues the service.

Securing permanent parking and perhaps even building a parking garage around University of Phoenix Stadium.

Possible pay raises or cost-of-living adjustments for city employees, whose pay has been frozen for years.

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