Homeless in Arizona

The sky is falling - We need a police state!!!!

FBI hacking squad used in domestic investigations

Source

FBI hacking squad used in domestic investigations, experts say

Suzanne Choney NBC News

The FBI is using its own hacking programs for installing malware and spyware on the computers of suspected terrorists or child pornographers, a tactic that is drawing attention in the wake of disclosures about the domestic online surveillance of Americans.

Among the programs is one known by various names, including the Remote Operations Unit and Remote Assistance Team, which uses private contractors to do the actual hacking of suspects. The contractors can send a virus, worm or other malware to a suspect's computer, giving law enforcement control of a wide range of activities, from turning a computer's webcam on and off to searching for documents on the machine, says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

"In the last few years the FBI has created a team that has solely focused on delivering what we call malware — viruses and worms — to people's computers to get control of them," he told NBC News.

The FBI was contacted Monday by NBC News for comment, but has not yet responded. If we hear back, we will update this story. The agency, believed to be behind a recent large-scale malware attack, declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal about the hacking issue. Meanwhile, CNET reports that the FBI has reportedly developed software to help intercept "metadata" — information like the websites visited and email addressed used by an individual — and it wants Internet providers to allow the agency to install the software, but is meeting with resistance.

Mark Rasch, former head of the Department of Justice's Computer Crimes Unit who has worked with the FBI in the past, said the existence of the hacking team is well-known, and that there are other similar teams, coordinating with private contractors.

"There's a whole bunch of groups in the FBI that do this," Rasch, now an independent consultant, told NBC News. "There's one that interfaces with telephone companies, another with Internet providers. These guys make 'critters' — malware, a bug, virus, a worm — that can infect the computer, the cellphone ... any kind of communication device."

However, he said, the FBI is obtaining court-approved warrants or wiretap orders to do the surveillance.

"If I'm going to turn on your camera on your laptop, I'm going to need to go through the same legal process that I would need in order to install a camera in your house," he said. "There are exceptions to the warrant requirement, but I would be surprised if they were doing this without a warrant or some kind of legal process."

Soghoian said he is not so sure that is the case. "We don't know much about what legal standards they follow," he said.

Earlier this year, he said, "we learned that the FBI had gone to a federal magistrate in Texas to ask for a warrant authorizing the delivery of malware that would take over a target's webcam, and download files from their computer. That judge said no, because he believed that covert webcam use required a wiretap order not just a warrant. The judge was also concerned that the government hadn't identified how it would make sure that only the court-approved target of the surveillance would be spied on, and not anyone else."

Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told NBC News that while the "government's access to hacking tools has been known for some time," until recently it "was not clear that they were being used in domestic criminal investigations."

"I don't think it is clear that a warrant or judicial order is sufficient to support the use of intrusive hacking tools," he said in an email. "These tools can cause damage to hardware and software, and allow the monitoring of personal communications and even audio-visual surveillance surrounding electronic device."

Butler believes the FBI's "authority to use these hacking tools has not been clearly established, and there should be a public review of the legality of this program."

Soghoian agrees. "What I'm focused on is that we haven't had a proper debate on this. There was no law giving the FBI authority to do this."

Rasch says the "real problem isn't the FBI or the law; it's technology," and the nature of malware, or "critters" that are "hard to control."

Malware does not discern who is using a device and the innocent may wind up getting hurt, or having their privacy invaded as collateral damage in cyber-spying.

"It's hard for me to write a virus that will only capture your actions on a computer without also capturing your kids using it to do their homework or your daughter getting undressed in front of a Web camera," he said.

Check out Technology and TODAY Tech on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

Drunk walking leads to pedestrians fatalities

For that reason I suspect they will use this as a lame excuse to allow the cops to arrest people for drunk walking, not for the safety of the drunks, but to raise revenue for the government.

Source

Drunk walking leads to pedestrians fatalities

Associated Press Mon Aug 5, 2013 4:35 PM

WASHINGTON — Just as drinking and driving can be deadly, so can drinking and walking. Over a third of U.S. pedestrians killed in 2011 had blood alcohol levels above the legal limit for driving, according to government data released Monday.

Thirty-five percent of those killed, or 1,547 pedestrians, had blood alcohol content levels of .08 or higher, the legal limit for driving, according to data reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration by state highway departments.

Among the 625 pedestrians aged 25- to 34-years-old who were killed, half were alcohol impaired. Just under half the pedestrians killed who were in their early 20s and their mid-30s to mid-50s were also impaired. Only among pedestrians age 55 or older or younger than age 20 was the share of those killed a third or less.

By comparison, 13 percent of drivers involved in crashes in which pedestrians were killed were over the .08 limit.

Overall, about a third of traffic fatalities in 2011 — 31 percent, or 9,878 deaths — were attributable to crashes involving a driver with a BAC of .08 or higher.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx released the data as he kicked off a new effort to reduce pedestrian deaths. There were 4,432 pedestrian fatalities in 2011, the latest year for which data is available. That was up 3 percent from the previous year.

Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices, said anti-drunk driving campaigns may be encouraging more people to walk home after a night of drinking.

Alcohol can impair pedestrians’ judgment and lead them to make bad decisions, like crossing a road in the wrong place, crossing is against the light, or “trying to beat a bus that’s coming,” he said.

There is no data on an increase in alcohol-impaired bicycle fatalities, but there has been discussion at safety conferences around the country about what appears to be the beginning of a trend, Adkins said.

Safety advocates have been warning for several years that they’re also seeing more cases of distracted walking. Several studies show that people who are talking on their cellphones while walking make more mistakes.

FBI informants authorized to break the law 5,600 times

Source

Licensed criminals: FBI informants authorized to break the law 5,600 times in one year

Published time: August 05, 2013 00:55

Edited time: August 06, 2013 09:30

In at least 5,658 cases in a single year alone, the FBI authorized its informants to commit crimes varying from selling drugs to plotting robberies, according to a copy of an FBI report obtained by USA Today.

After much redacting by the authorities, the watered-down FBI's 2011 report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has revealed that agents had been authorizing 15 crimes a day on average, in order to get the necessary information from their informants.

The document does not indicate the severity of the crimes authorized by the agency, nor does it include material about violations that were committed without the government's permission. It just sites a number of 5,658 Tier I and II infractions committed by criminals to help the bureau battle crime.

According to the Department of Justice Tier I is the most severe and includes “any activity that would constitute a misdemeanour or felony under federal, state, or local law if engaged in by a person acting without authorization and that involves the commission or the significant risk of the commission of certain offenses, including acts of violence; corrupt conduct by senior federal, state, or local public officials; or the manufacture, importing, exporting, possession, or trafficking in controlled substances of certain quantities.”

The Tier II includes the same range of crimes but committed by informants acting without authorization from a federal prosecutor but only from their senior field manager in FBI.

In the past, the newspaper revealed, the violations ranged from drug dealing to bribery.

As an example of severe crime committed by an authorized informant, the newspaper references the case of James Bulger, a mobster in Boston who was allowed by the Federal government to run a gang ring in exchange for insider information about the Mafia. Since then, the US Justice Department ordered the FBI to track and record the wrongdoings of the informants, results of which are due annually.

The FBI remains secretive about its informants. It is known that in 2007, the FBI estimated that around 15,000 confidential sources were employed by the bureau.

The Justice Department has requirements in place which spell out the rules of engagement with informants and “otherwise illegal activity.” Authorization of violent crimes are not allowed by field agents and serious offenses must first be approved by federal prosecutors. But as the publication notes, the FBI’s Inspector General concluded in 2005 that the agency routinely failed to abide by those rules.

The FBI’s scheme to gather information using such methods is believed to be only the tip of the iceberg as other local, state and federal agencies also reportedly engage in similar practices. The FBI’s share of criminal prosecutions in court only amount to 10 percent of all criminal cases.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the FBI, Denise Ballew, declined to comment the report saying only that the circumstances in which the bureau allows its informants to break the law are "situational, tightly controlled.

Groundwork Laid, Growers Turn to Hemp in Colorado

From what I have read marijuana was re-legalized during WWII, not to help the troops get high, but because the hemp plant was used to make rope and canvas needed for the war.

Source

Groundwork Laid, Growers Turn to Hemp in Colorado

By JACK HEALY

Published: August 5, 2013

SPRINGFIELD, Colo. — Along the plains of eastern Colorado, on a patch of soil where his father once raised alfalfa, Ryan Loflin is growing a leafy green challenge to the nation’s drug laws.

As part of regulation, Colorado will be able to randomly test hemp crops to ensure that they have only trace amounts of THC, a chemical in marijuana.

His fields are sown with hemp, a tame cousin of marijuana that was once grown openly in the United States but is now outlawed as a controlled substance. Last year, as Colorado voters legalized marijuana for recreational use, they also approved a measure laying a path for farmers like Mr. Loflin, 40, to once again grow and harvest hemp, a potentially lucrative crop that can be processed into goods as diverse as cooking oil, clothing and building material. This spring, he became the first farmer in Colorado to publicly sow his fields with hemp seed.

“I’m not going to hide anymore,” he said one recent morning after striding through a sea of hip-high plants growing fast under the sun.

Mr. Loflin’s 60-acre experiment is one of an estimated two dozen small hemp plantings sprouting in Colorado. Hemp cultivation presents a vexing problem for the federal government, which draws no distinction between hemp and marijuana, as it decides how to respond to a new era of legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington State.

State agencies have worked quickly to create new rules, licenses and taxes for hemp and recreational marijuana. Many towns have voted to ban the new retailers; others have decided to regulate them. Denver, for example, is proposing a 5 percent tax on recreational marijuana sales.

Colorado has set up an industrial hemp commission to write rules to register hemp farmers and charge them a fee to grow the crop commercially.

“It’s something that can be copied and used nationally,” said Michael Bowman, a farmer in northeastern Colorado who sits on the state hemp commission. “We’re trying to build a legitimate industry.”

The state will also be able to randomly test crops to ensure that they contain no more than 0.3 percent THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, far below the level found in marijuana.

Opponents say that hemp and marijuana are essentially the same plant and that both contain the same psychoactive substance. But supporters say that comparing hemp with potent strains of marijuana is like comparing a nonalcoholic beer with a bottle of vodka.

Still, farmers and marijuana advocates worry: will drug agents stand on the sidelines and allow Colorado and Washington to pursue their own experiments with legalization? Or will the federal government crack down to assert its authority over drug policies?

A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Agency in Denver said hemp farmers were “not on our radar,” but R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Obama administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, has offered stern words against both marijuana and hemp, saying that no matter what states did, the plants were still illegal in the federal government’s view.

“Hemp and marijuana are part of the same species of cannabis plant,” Mr. Kerlikowske wrote in response to a 2011 petition that sought to legalize hemp cultivation. “While most of the THC in cannabis plants is concentrated in the marijuana, all parts of the plant, including hemp, can contain THC, a Schedule I controlled substance.”

Lately, hemp has been tiptoeing toward the agricultural mainstream, gaining support from farmers’ trade groups and a wide array of politicians in statehouses and in Washington. In the Republican-controlled House, a provision tucked into the farm bill would let universities in hemp-friendly states grow small plots for research.

A handful of states, from liberal Vermont to conservative North Dakota and Kentucky, have voted to allow commercial hemp. In Vermont, any farmers who want to register as hemp growers under a new state program have to sign a form acknowledging that they risk losing their agricultural subsidies, farm equipment and livelihoods if federal agents decide to swoop in.

Every year, the federal authorities seize and destroy millions of marijuana plants — a crackdown that has rattled the medical marijuana industry in California — but the pace of seizures has dropped sharply in recent years. In 2012, federal officials reported that 3.9 million cannabis plants had been destroyed under D.E.A. eradication efforts. A year earlier, officials said they had eradicated 6.7 million plants.

Beyond the risk of federal raids and seizures, Kevin Sabet, a former drug policy adviser in the Obama administration, said the market for hemp goods is still vanishingly small and questioned whether it could really be a panacea for farmers. [This sounds like a drug warrior slinging the BS and saying negative stuff about hemp for the sake of demonizing it. From what I have read hemp is a much better industrial crop then cotton]

Ryan Loflin and other hemp farmers walk a precarious line, as the state said it would not authorize planting until next year.

“Hemp is the redheaded stepchild of marijuana policy, and probably for good reason,” said Mr. Sabet, who is now the director of the Drug Policy Institute. “In a world with finite capacity to handle drug problems, my advice would be for people to think less about an insignificant issue like hemp and more about the very real issues of drug addiction, marijuana commercialization and glamorization, and how to make our policies work better.” [So don't grow this hemp for industrial purposes because it has the ability to get people high, even if you have to smoke a suitcase full of the industrial quality hemp to get high. Sounds like advice from a cops who needs the "drug war" to keep his high paying job arresting pot smokers]

Even without the threat of federal raids, transforming hemp into a cash crop will be like asking a clear sky for rain. Viable seeds are illegal and scarce. Few working farmers or experts in the United States have any expertise in growing hemp. And there is basically no infrastructure to process the plants into legal components like oil, fibers and proteins. [Well before 1937, when it was made illegal, hemp was routinely grown as an industrial crop.]

In Colorado, Jason Lauve, the executive director of Hemp Cleans, an advocacy group, said he has spoken with about two dozen small farmers and landowners who are cautiously growing their first hemp crops.

“We’re really walking gently,” Mr. Lauve said. “We don’t want to put people at risk. We want to see how much states’ rights really protect us, versus the jurisdiction of the federal government.”

Even here, farmers like Mr. Loflin are walking a precarious line. Although Colorado voters opened the door to hemp farming last year, the state warned would-be hemp farmers in May that they would not be authorized to plant until early in 2014.

But this spring, Mr. Loflin decided it was time. For years, he had read about how hemp could replenish undernourished soil and be woven and squeezed into a wide array of products. He drinks a shot of hemp oil for his health every day — “It tastes kind of like grass” — and believes the plant could one day lift the fortunes of struggling small farmers.

He spent the winter assembling a seed collection from suppliers in Britain, Canada, China and Germany, where hemp is legal. They entered the country via U.P.S., labeled “bird seed” or “toasted hemp seed.” One bag was seized by customs officials, he said. Some 1,500 pounds of seeds were not.

At the end of June, with more than $15,000 invested in the venture, he planted his crop. He said he alerted his neighbors and has not gotten any complaints from people around Springfield, or from federal officials.

When Mr. Loflin visits the farm from his home in western Colorado, he half-expects to see D.E.A. cars racing down Highway 160 to burn down his crop before harvest. But he believes he can stake a living in hemp’s oily seeds and versatile fibers. He has gotten tired of his day job building ski homes in the mountains. To him, hemp’s outlaw status is just another hazard of starting a business.

“It’s well worth the risk,” he said. “It’s hemp. Come on, it just needs to be done.”

Michael Beasley busted for marijuana

Phoenix Suns’ Michael Beasley arrested in Scottsdale in drug possession

By Erin O’Connor and Matthew Longdon The Arizona Republic-12 news Breaking News Team Tue Aug 6, 2013 7:15 PM

Phoenix Suns forward Michael Beasley, already under scrutiny over sexual-assault allegations, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of drug possession, according to Scottsdale police.

Police contacted Beasley at 1:15 a.m. for an alleged traffic violation near Scottsdale and McCormick roads.

An officer detected the smell of marijuana coming from the vehicle, and an undisclosed amount of narcotics located in the driver area were seized during a search of the car, Scottsdale police said.

Bickley: Is Beasley most pathetic player in Suns history?

Police arrested Beasley, 24, on suspicion of marijuana possession and he was released from custody. Scottsdale police said the officer determined Beasley was not impaired, but no further details were released.

It’s the latest legal issue for the Suns forward, who has yet to be cleared in a sexual assault case investigated by Scottsdale police. In January, a woman accused the basketball player and another man of assaulting her in Beasley’s home. No one has been charged.

Nearly two weeks after the claim was made, police cited Beasley for several offenses including speeding, driving on a suspended Arizona license, and driving without a vehicle license plate or registration.

Beasley has a history of drug abuse but claimed to have learned his lesson when he signed a three year, $18-million contract with the Suns in 2012. He went to rehab in 2009 after run-ins with police for marijuana. He was arrested again in 2011.

"I realized 10 minutes of feeling good is not really worth putting my life and my career and my legacy in jeopardy,” Beasley said at introductory press conference in 2012 after signing with the Suns. “I'm confident to say that that part of my career, that part of my life is over and won't be coming back."

Suns management did not respond to a request for comment.

A Kansas State University graduate, Beasley was a second-round pick for the Miama Heat in 2008, but spent more time off the court than on due to injuries. He was with the team for two seasons before being traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2010.

Reporters Laurie Merrill and Paul Coro contributed to this article.

Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

Arizona's medical marijuana law says people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations are they are called can't be arrested for DUI simply because they have marijuana metabolites in their body, but the cops have decided to ignore Prop 203 and arrest medical marijuana patients for DUI solely because they have microscopic traces of marijuana in their body.

I believe Arizona's DUI/DWI laws are among the strictest in the nation and if even a microscopic trace of marijuana is detected in your body you are consider guilty of drunk driving according to ARS 28-1381 and ARS 13-3401

28-1381.A. It is unlawful for a person to drive or be in actual physical control of a vehicle in this state under any of the following circumstance

3. While there is any drug defined in section 13-3401 or its metabolite in the person's body.

13-3401. Definitions

4. "Cannabis" ...

ARS 36-2802.D Operating, navigating or being in actual physical control of any motor vehicle, aircraft or motorboat while under the influence of marijuana, except that a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment.

Source

Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Aug 7, 2013 10:54 PM

Medical-marijuana cardholders in Arizona who drive after using the drug may face a difficult legal choice: their driver’s license or their marijuana card. If they use both, they could be charged with DUI.

Valley prosecutors say that any trace of marijuana in a driver’s blood is enough to charge a motorist with driving under the influence of drugs [per ARS 28-1381.A and ARS 13-3401] and that a card authorizing use of medical pot is no defense. [per ARS 36-2802.D - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

But advocates of medical marijuana, which voters approved in November 2010, argue that the presence of marijuana in a person’s bloodstream is not grounds for charging drivers who are allowed to use the drug. [again per ARS 36-2802.D]

The legal battle over the rights of medical-marijuana cardholders to drive while medicating is being fought in the state’s court system. Motorists convicted in municipal courts, which typically rule it unlawful for a driver to have any trace of marijuana in his or her blood, are appealing cases to Superior Court, where judges’ decisions could set precedents for how the medical-marijuana law applies to Arizona drivers.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia authorize the use of marijuana for medical purposes, making marijuana-related DUIs an issue for police, prosecutors and politicians nationwide.

The biggest issue is deciding what blood level of marijuana makes a driver impaired, similar to the way blood-alcohol levels determine when a person is legally drunk. [Arizona's DUI laws say any microscopic trace of an illegal drug is an automatic conviction for DUI, but Arizona's medical marijuana law says this does not apply to people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations]

In Arizona, the confusion over interpretation of the Medical Marijuana Act stems from its inception because prosecutors and police didn’t have the chance to weigh in before it went to voters in 2010. [it's not confusion, police and prosecutors have decided to ignore Prop 203 which says - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

Prosecutors say Arizona law allows motorists who are not impaired to drive with prescription drugs in their system if they are using them under doctors’ orders.

The problem for marijuana cardholders is that pot can’t be prescribed, only recommended, offering no legal grounds for a motorist to drive with even trace amounts of the drug in their system, according to prosecutors. [wrong Prop 203 very specifically excludes people with medical marijuana prescriptions - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

For most driving-under-the-influence-of-marijuana cases, the drug charge is secondary to the charge of driving while impaired. Arizona’s DUI laws have three aspects: driving while impaired to the slightest degree, driving under the influence of alcohol and driving under the influence of drugs.

The handful of cases making their way through the courts grew out of traffic stops, where drivers are typically cited for both driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Attorneys for the accused say they are willing to argue about impairment, which would allow a drug expert hired by the defense to counter testimony from a police drug-recognition expert, but that a suspect’s legal participation in the state’s medical-marijuana program should provide a defense to the DUI-drug charge if there is no evidence of impairment.

Prosecutors in Mesa and other jurisdictions have successfully argued to keep juries from hearing information about a suspect’s medical-marijuana card, which could be appealed.

“They can make that argument (about impairment) and I think it’s a fair one to make. What they can’t do is preclude a jury from hearing that he has a medical-marijuana card,” said Craig Rosenstein, an attorney representing a DUI-drug suspect in Mesa. “The idea that he would be able to beat the (DUI-drug) charge is impossible unless the jury can hear that they have a medical-marijuana card. Otherwise, he’s just a kid smoking weed and he got caught.”

Morgan Jackson Doyle, 24, was coming back from the Salt River on Memorial Day 2012 when he was stopped at a sobriety checkpoint by Mesa police near Power Road and the Red Mountain Freeway.

An officer said Doyle had reddened eyes and a raspy voice, which prompted him to ask whether Doyle had recently smoked marijuana, according to police.

Rosenstein, Doyle’s lawyer, said Doyle gave the officer his medical-marijuana card with his driver’s license, “out of an abundance of truth.”

Doyle was put through a series of field-sobriety tests, some of which indicated impairment while others did not, before a trained drug-recognition officer was called to put Doyle through more thorough tests that look for clues of drug use.

The drug-recognition expert determined it was not safe for Doyle to drive, police said. He was cited for driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Blood tests later showed Doyle had the psychoactive component of marijuana in his blood, but in an amount that falls below levels some scientists consider the threshold for impairment.

A judge in Mesa refused to allow Doyle to introduce the card at his trial, prompting his lawyer to seek a ruling in Superior Court, which sent the case back to Mesa. If the court rules as expected, attorneys said the case will be appealed.

“I think it’s ridiculous. Voters in Arizona adopted the Medical Marijuana Act, whether politicians agree, or not,” Rosenstein said. “My concern was, if this isn’t isolated to Mesa, in theory that could make bad law for the entire state.”

Phoenix prosecutors have taken the same stance on drug DUIs for marijuana cardholders, in part, because the drug does not come with any of the same controls as a standard prescription, said Beth Barnes, the city’s traffic-safety resource prosecutor.

The potency of marijuana can vary among dispensaries that sell to patients, and doctors’ recommendations do not have dosage limits and warning against operating heavy machinery that prescriptions usually carry, she said.

Those and other factors mean possession of a card is not relevant in DUI cases, Barnes said.

Aaron Carreón-Ainsa, Phoenix’s chief prosecutor, said he understands it is legal for authorized patients to use medical marijuana, but that right can infringe on other privileges they might enjoy.

“For those people who have medical-marijuana cards, OK, it’s legal. Fine,” Carreón-Ainsa said. “But don’t come to this building because you’ve been driving. Just take it and don’t drive.”

Blood concentration

Though some states have tried to attach a number to impairment, experts say the practice is complicated by a number of factors including the patient’s metabolism and smoking frequency.

A 10-year study of more than 8,700 DUI-drug cases in Sweden led researchers to conclude that zero-tolerance policies were probably most effective because they help identify suspects whose concentration-level might have fallen below an arbitrarily set limit while waiting to give a blood sample.

“Scientists have found it virtually impossible to agree upon the concentration of a psychoactive substance in blood that leads to impairment in the vast majority of people,” the researchers wrote.

Colorado legislators consistently rejected proposals to link impairment with a particular amount of marijuana in a driver’s blood, but this year passed a law allowing prosecutors to presume impairment if that level is above 5 nanograms per milliliter. Defense attorneys argue that 5 nanograms is an arbitrary amount that has no bearing on impairment.

“We need to stop looking at a meaningless number, and in the case of Arizona, not only a meaningless number but a cruel and unusual application of it: you punish somebody on a Monday morning for them killing their pain on a Friday night,” said Lenny Frieling, a Colorado attorney and medical-marijuana advocate.

“I don’t want impaired drivers on the road. The key in my mind is looking at whether somebody really is or is not impaired. If they’re impaired, I don’t care which drug impaired them.” [but Arizona's DUI laws in ARS 28-1381 say that anybody with a detectable amount of an illegal drug is considered guilty of DUI even if they ARE NOT impaired - and a person can have marijuana metabolites in their body weeks after using marijuana]

Frieling is developing a mobile test that gauges factors, including memory and balance, that could help determine impairment, but without years of clinical trials and research about marijuana concentrations that equate to impairment, the issue often relies on police drug-recognition experts and interpretation of state laws.

Courts within the same states have been inconsistent in applying the law.

A Michigan man was charged with driving a car with a prohibited substance in his system after he told an officer during a traffic stop that he was an authorized medical-marijuana cardholder and had smoked five hours earlier.

A judge concluded that the state’s medical-marijuana law protected him from prosecution unless police could prove he was impaired. Another court agreed before the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the judge’s order and determined that legislators deemed it unsafe for a motorist to drive with any amount of marijuana in their system.

The Michigan Supreme Court reversed that Appeals Court decision earlier this year and found that the state’s medical-marijuana law authorized participants to have traces of marijuana in their bloodstream so long as they were not impaired while driving.

The Michigan driver’s blood contained 10 ng/ml of the active marijuana metabolite — twice the limit adopted in Colorado — but the justices said the amount was not enough to constitute driving under the influence without evidence of impairment.

“The MMMA (Michigan Medical Marihuana Act) shields registered patients from the internal possession of marijuana,” the court ruled. “The MMMA does not define what it means to be ‘under the influence’ but the phrase clearly contemplates something more than having any amount of marijuana in one’s system and requires some effect on the person.”

Arizona’s medical-marijuana users should be afforded similar protections when they are not impaired, say the law’s supporters.

Andrew Myers, campaign manager for the organization that got the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act on the 2010 ballot, said law enforcement should not base an arrest solely on the presence of marijuana in a cardholder’s system.

“The presence of metabolites alone shall not constitute impairment under the law — period,” he said. He said the program’s language was “very mindfully” written to avoid cases such as the Mesa case.

“There’s absolutely no way that, if challenged in court, that a conviction would stand — the law is absolutely clear on this point,” Myers said. “You could medicate on a Friday and get pulled over on a Monday two weeks later. It’s that ridiculous — it would absolutely preclude any medical-marijuana cardholder from operating a motor vehicle at any time if they were an active patient. And that’s ridiculously onerous and it’s not reflective of reality for a person who medicates.”

Myers said law enforcement should propose legislation to establish a legal standard of impairment: “Until that point, I think the law needs to favor the citizenry,” he said. [Arizona's medical marijuana law clearly says it is illegal to drive when stoned on marijuana, but it also says that you are not considered guilty of DUI simply because you have marijuana metabolites in your body.]

Obama flushes Constitution and Bill of Rights???

Source

Obama unveils efforts to increase transparency on surveillance

By Holly Bailey, Yahoo! News | Yahoo! News

President Barack Obama unveiled new efforts to increase transparency and “build greater confidence” about the government’s controversial surveillance efforts, acknowledging that the public’s trust has been shaken after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked operational details about the programs.

“It’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs,” Obama declared at a White House news conference. “The American people have to have confidence as well.”

Among other things, Obama called for the creation of an outside task force to advise his administration on how to balance civil liberties and security issues. He also said he had directed the intelligence community to make as much information about the spying programs as possible and directed the NSA to create a website that would be a “hub” for that information.

“These steps are designed to make sure the American people can trust that our interests are aligned with our values,” Obama said.

Asked about his decision to cancel a September summit with Russian President Vladmir Putin, Obama admitted Moscow’s decision to grant Snowden asylum played a role in that decision, but insisted it wasn’t the only factor. He pointed to differences on Syria and human rights and said he believed it was more helpful to “take a pause, reassess where Russia’s going” and “calibrate the relationship” before meeting with the Russian leader.

“The latest episode is just one more in a number of emerging differences that we’ve seen over the last several months,” Obama said.

Obama announces NSA reforms

Obama announces NSA reforms, takes questions at news conference

By Steven R. Hurst Associated Press Fri Aug 9, 2013 1:09 PM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama announced a series of steps Friday meant to ease fears about the scope of secret domestic and foreign surveillance activities, saying he is confident the programs are “not being abused” but that they must be more transparent.

He gave no indication he was ready to end the massive collection of information about Americans’ telephone calls and email. [This is typical of our lying double talking politicians. They have one press conference to say they are FOR something and then another press conference to say they are AGAINST the same thing. I suspect it works and people believe the version that they wish was true. As opposed to hearing both conflicting stories and realizing that one way or another the politicians are lying to us.]

In his first press conference since April, Obama also explained his decision to cancel a summit meeting next month with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and said he had only “mixed” success in moving forward in resetting the relationship between the two countries.

Russia’s recent decision to grant asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was not the only reason for calling off the Putin meeting, Obama said.

He encouraged Putin to “think forward instead of backwards” on a long list of issues that will define currently strained relations in the future.

In wide-ranging comments lasting nearly an hour, Obama also said it would not be appropriate to boycott the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, despite Russian laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians.

The president also said he did not consider Snowden, who is charged in federal court with violations of the Espionage Act, as a whistleblower or “patriot.” He invited Snowden, if he feels what he did was legal and right, to return to the United States to defend his actions. [Yea, Obama will let Snowden defend his actions - from a prison cell to a kangaroo court]

Addressing the issues raised by Snowden’s leaks of secret government surveillance programs, Obama said the world needs to be convinced that U.S. espionage does not step on their rights. [In that case stop the spying and pardon Snowden and Manning]

One goal of Obama’s news conference was to try to calm anger over a spying program that has been kept secret for years and that the administration falsely denied ever existed. [Trust us, we haven't flushed the Bill of Rights down the toilet, and even if we did it's for your own benefit! Honest!!!]

The administration was releasing more information Friday about how it gathers intelligence at home and abroad, plus the legal rationale for the bulk collection of phone records without individual warrants. That program was authorized under the USA Patriot Act, which Congress hurriedly passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the U.S. [And many legal scholars will tell you the Patriot Act is blatantly unconstitutional!!!!]

The National Security Agency says phone records are the only things it collects in bulk under that law. [Trust us, we aren't keeping track of anything else you do. Honest! Swear to God!!! And no we didn't video tape the sex you had with that women who is your mistress] But officials have left open the possibility that it could create similar databases of people’s credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches. [Again trust the NSA. Don't think of them violation your Constitutional rights, they are protecting you from those terrorists that hide under your bed and only come out at night!!! Honest!!!]

The changes Obama endorsed Friday include the formation of an outside advisory panel to review U.S. surveillance powers, assigning a privacy officer at the National Security Agency, and the creation of an independent attorney to argue against the government before the nation’s surveillance court. [Yea, an independent attorney that reports to Obama and the NSA!!!]

All those new positions would carry out most of their duties in secret. [And unless another guy like Snowden comes along and exposes us, we will pretend we are no longer keeping a dossier on you.]

The debate over national security and privacy began with the leaks by Snowden, a former government contract systems analyst, who revealed classified documents exposing NSA programs that store years of phone records on every American.

That revelation prompted the most significant reconsideration yet of the vast surveillance powers Congress granted the president after the 2001 attacks.

Obama has found Congress surprisingly hostile to those powers since they were made public, especially from an unusual coalition of libertarian-leaning conservatives and liberal Democrats. [Rubbish!!! Congress is only hostile to those powers in the media because they want to get re-elected. Congress has done NOTHING to repeal the Patriot Act.]

The administration says it only looks at the phone records when investigating suspected terrorists. But testimony before Congress revealed how easy it is for Americans with no connection to terrorism to unwittingly have their calling patterns analyzed by the government.

When the NSA identifies a suspect, analysts can look not just at the suspect’s phone records but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people.

If the average person called 40 unique people, for example, analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Yemen official: U.S. drones kill 12 in 3 airstrikes

Source

Yemen official: U.S. drones kill 12 in 3 airstrikes

Associated Press Thu Aug 8, 2013 8:36 PM

SANAA, Yemen — The U.S. has sharply escalated its drone war in Yemen, with military officials in the Arab country reporting 34 suspected al-Qaida militants killed in less than two weeks, including three strikes on Thursday alone in which a dozen died.

The action against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen branch is known, comes amid a global terror alert issued by Washington. One Mideast official says the uptick is due to its leaders leaving themselves more vulnerable by moving from their normal hideouts toward areas where they could carry out attacks.

The U.S. and Britain evacuated diplomatic staff from the capital of Sanaa this week after learning of a threatened attack that prompted Washington to close temporarily 19 diplomatic posts in the Middle East and Africa.

Thursday’s first reported drone attack hit a car carrying suspected militants in the district of Wadi Ubaidah, about 175 kilometers (109 miles) east of Sanaa, and killed six, a security official said.

Badly burned bodies lay beside their vehicle, according to the official. Five of the dead were Yemenis, while the sixth was believed to be of another Arab nationality, he said.

The second drone attack killed three alleged militants in the al-Ayoon area of Hadramawt province in the south, the official said. The third, also in Hadramawt province, killed three more suspected militants in the al-Qutn area, he added.

All the airstrikes targeted cars, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The drone strikes have become a near-daily routine since they began July 27. So far, they have been concentrated in remote, mountainous areas where al-Qaida’s top five leaders are believed to have taken refuge.

But drones also have been seen and heard buzzing for hours over Sanaa, worrying residents who fear getting caught in the crossfire.

While the United States acknowledges its drone program in Yemen, it does not talk about individual strikes or release information on how many are carried out. The program is run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA, with the military flying its drones out of Djibouti, and the CIA out of a base in Saudi Arabia.

Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale declined to comment Thursday and would not confirm the existence of a military drone program in Yemen. The CIA also declined to comment.

Since July 27, drone attacks have killed 34 suspected militants, according to an Associated Press count based on information provided by Yemeni security officials.

The terror network’s Yemeni offshoot bolstered its operations in Yemen more than a decade after key Saudi operatives fled here following a major crackdown in their homeland. The drone strikes and a U.S.-backed offensive that began in June 2012 have driven militants from towns and large swaths of land they had seized a year earlier, during Yemen’s political turmoil amid the Arab Spring.

The sudden drone barrage could further upset a population already angered by bombings that have killed civilians, said Gregory Johnsen, the author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaida and America’s War in Arabia.”

“It’s a really rapid increase when there was a long time where there were no drone strikes for weeks,” Johnsen said in an interview with the AP. “This has a lot of people in Yemen on edge.”

A U.S. intelligence official and a Mideast diplomat have told the AP that the embassy closures were triggered by the interception of a secret message between al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri and Nasser al-Wahishi, the leader of the Yemen-based offshoot, about plans for a major attack.

Authorities in Yemen said they had discovered al-Qaida plot to target foreign embassies in Sanaa and international shipping in the Red Sea.

Yemeni authorities said this week that a group of al-Qaida militants have entered Sanaa and other cities to carry attacks. It issued list of 25 al-Qaida wanted militants. The Yemeni statement said security forces will pay $23,000 to anyone who comes forward with information that leads to the arrests of any of the wanted men.

The discovery of the al-Qaida plot prompted the Defense Ministry to step up security around the strategic Bab el-Mandeb waterway, which connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. Officials banning speedboats or fishing vessels from the area.

Details of the plot were reminiscent of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000 in Aden harbor that killed 17 American sailors.

One local political analyst suggests the latest plots were floated by the group to show it is still a formidable force.

“Al-Qaida has suffered losses and it is trying to make an impression,” said analyst Ali al-Sarari, who is close to the Yemeni government. “The mere talk about an upcoming attack gives the group a chance to restore its shattered image … as a group capable of exporting terrorism.”

A senior security official told AP that the al-Qaida leaders never meet together out of fear of a drone attack killing all of them at once. These include al-Wahishi, a onetime aide to Osama bin Laden; Qassem al-Raimi, believed to be the military commander; and Ibrahim al-Asiri.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to brief the media, said al-Wahishi is believed to be trying to recruit informants in the mountainous areas of Marib in central Yemen, especially in the Wadi Ubaidah valley, where tribal allies of ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh are concentrated.

Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi became president in 2012 after a year of mass protests demanding Saleh’s ouster. Since then, Hadi has accused Saleh’s men, who are still in key positions in security agencies and municipalities, of trying to hinder his reforms.

Marib is one of the few places known to be al-Qaida strongholds, and the Yemeni military has not tried to carry out a large offensive there because of the strong presence of anti-government tribes.

The official said al-Raimi is believed to be moving in southern Yemen, while al-Asiri is believed to be in the north, close to the border with Saudi Arabia, his home.

Johnsen said the U.S. faces a major problem in Yemen when it comes to intelligence gathered on the ground. By relying solely on cellphone calls and other intercepts, chances are increased that a drone strike could merely target a tribesmen who once called an al-Qaida figure, rather than a militant, he said.

“The U.S. is firing missiles into a country, if not blindly, maybe just one-eyed.” he added.

Yemeni troops have stepped up security across Sanaa, with multiple checkpoints set up and tanks and other military vehicles guarding vital institutions. The army has surrounded foreign installations, government offices and the airport with tanks and troops.

In Sanaa’s cafes and on its public transportation, the drones were a popular topic of conversation, prompting fear and even some dark humor.

“These aircraft are really scaring people here,” said Mohammed al-Mohandis, a teacher, who added that he and his friends heard the drone while chewing leaves of qat, the mild stimulant plant that is addictively used in Yemen.

Al-Mohandis even joked with his buddies that someone could have planted an electronic chip on them. “Watch out, or you are finished!” he said, drawing laughter.

Another Sanaa resident, Ahmed Said, suggested the Americans should target those who cause power outages in the city, instead of al-Qaida.

Speaking to AP over the phone, Said shouted at a man crossing the street slowly: “Hurry up, the drone will hit you!”

———

Michael reported from Cairo. Associated Press Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier in Washington and Jon Gambrell in Cairo contributed to this report.

House and Senate finding common ground on E-Verify

I don't feel that way but the racist tyrants in the US Congress do.

Source

House and Senate finding common ground on E-Verify

By Erin Kelly Republic Washington Bureau Wed Aug 7, 2013 10:59 PM

WASHINGTON -- While the Senate and House remain far apart on the best way to overhaul the nation’s broken immigration system, there is strong agreement on the need for an electronic employment-verification system that would affect all U.S. workers and impose huge new penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.

The Migration Policy Institute at New York University’s School of Law released a side-by-side comparison of the sweeping immigration-reform bill passed by the Senate in June and the five House bills that have passed key committees this year.

The one area where the two chambers’ approaches are almost identical are provisions making it mandatory for employers nationwide to check all new employees through a federal database known as E-Verify.

All employees, including U.S. citizens, would have to undergo the check when they apply for a job to ensure they are legally eligible to work here.

“The workplace will change fundamentally for all workers if this becomes law,” said Muzaffar Chishti, the institute’s director.

Currently, the system is voluntary for most employers. A few states, including Arizona, require employers to use the system under state law. Some federal contractors must use the system.

Under existing law, employers who knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant are subject to minimum fines of $375 per worker for their first offense and $4,300 for their third offense, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Those fines would swell under the Senate-passed bill to $3,500 to $7,000 per worker for a first offense and $10,000 to $25,000 for the third violation.

The bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee would impose fines of $2,500 to $5,000 for the first offense. The penalty for the third violation would be the same as the Senate bill.

“There is a big ramping-up of penalties in both bills,” Chishti said.

The Senate bill gives the Department of Homeland Security four years to improve the current E-Verify system and implement it nationwide.

The House bill gives the DHS only two years, but it permits deadline extensions, if needed.

The House bill would allow private contractors to run the database, while the Senate requires federal employees to operate it.

The rare agreement between the two chambers on an immigration issue reflects bipartisan support for trying to reduce future illegal immigration by making it more difficult for undocumented workers to find jobs.

But big differences between the Senate and House approaches to immigration reform still make an overall compromise tough, especially on how to deal with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, MPI experts said.

“It is certainly the most politically difficult issue for the House,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow and director of the institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program.

The Senate bill would offer many of those immigrants a 13-year pathway to citizenship if they underwent background checks, paid fines and back taxes and learned English and American civics.

House leaders are working on a much narrower bill, tentatively called the Kids Act, which would offer citizenship only to certain young immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Republican leaders of the House Judiciary Committee also have raised the possibility of offering legal status, but not citizenship, to adult immigrants who entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas.

That idea was rejected in the Senate and has been denounced by most Democrats and immigrant-rights groups, which argue that it would create a permanent underclass of U.S. residents cut off from the American dream no matter how hard they worked.

The Senate in June passed a sweeping immigration overhaul that would create a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants, double the number of Border Patrol agents on the southwestern border, change the visa system to bring in more high-tech workers, and require employers to use the federal E-Verify system.

The House has been taking a piecemeal approach, passing a bipartisan border-security bill out of the House Homeland Security Committee and four other bills out of the House Judiciary Committee.

Although details vary between the Senate and House bills, they agree on certain key elements beyond E-Verify, including stronger security on the southwestern border, an increase in the number of visas for high-tech workers, and the need for a new program to bring in agricultural workers for both seasonal and year-round work on American farms.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the architects of the Senate-passed immigration bill, said Wednesday that he believes the House and Senate can reach a compromise if the House passes legislation.

Senate and House negotiators would iron out differences in their legislation and come up with a final bill.

“A couple of their pieces are very similar to our bill on agriculture and high tech, letting high-tech people in,” Schumer said in an interview on CNN. “Others are going to be different, but if we can get together at the end of day and compromise, that will be a good thing.”

Congress is in recess until Sept. 9, and the House is not expected to take up immigration reform until October at the earliest because it must first deal with pressing budget issues.

“I actually am optimistic that we will get this done,” Schumer said.

“I have had a lot of discussions with various members of both parties in the House. Things are moving in the right direction.”

Court vacates Ariz. conviction for invalid search

Just about EVERY time I have been stopped by the police and take the 5th Amendment the police almost always say I don't have any 5th Amendment rights in this case.

The next thing the police usually do after telling me I don't have any 5th Amendment rights is violate my 4th Amendment rights by illegally searching me looking for an ID to figured out my name, and of course looking for drugs and guns.

I haven't video taped any illegal searches yet, but in this video Chandler Police Officer G Pederson, badge number 200, tells me the 5th Amendment is null and void and that Miranda V Arizona doesn't apply in this case.

Here is the video:

Video - Bad Chandler cop

Story - Bad Chandler cop

Court vacates Ariz. conviction for invalid search

Associated Press Thu Aug 8, 2013 4:10 PM

TUCSON — A federal appeals court has vacated the conviction of a man in southern Arizona because of an invalid search involving a drug-sniffing dog.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a district court must decide whether prosecutors can establish the reliability of the trained canine or Jonathan Michael Thomas should get a new trial.

Thomas was arrested in February 2010 at a Border Patrol checkpoint after about 150 pounds of marijuana was found in a locked toolbox in his truck. He eventually was sentenced to 30 months of incarceration.

Thomas appealed, saying the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights that prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures.

He says the dog failed to indicate that it smelled drugs in the toolbox and was led on by the border agent-handler.

Sheriff Joe's goons required to carry guns 24/7

A lame excuse to give Maricopa County Sheriff Deputy's a pay raise???

I wonder if this is a tactic to get the cops at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office a raise???

First Sheriff Joe requires them to carry guns 24/7. I bet what will happen next is they will file a lawsuit demanding to be paid more money because they are required to carry a gun when they are off duty.

"The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has ... implemented a policy requiring the deputies to carry a firearm at all times, even when off duty.

Let's face it the police don't "protect and serve us" as they claim, the police are at war with us. Just like in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan where the bad guys are armed with M16s which are the military version of the AR-15.

It sure would be nice if the good guys in America could be armed with AK-47s like many civilians in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were.

Source

Arpaio arms deputies with AR-15 style rifles

By D.S. Woodfill The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 8, 2013 10:35 PM

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has issued semiautomatic AR-15-style rifles to each patrol deputy and implemented a policy requiring the deputies to carry a firearm at all times, even when off duty.

Hours after a Maricopa County jail worker was fatally shot in his front yard Thursday, Sheriff Joe Arpaio stood in front of hundreds of boxes with AR-15 assault rifles for his deputies.

Several rifles, bought with about $500,000 seized under federal RICO laws, were arranged in front of Arpaio’s lectern at a news conference he planned the day before Jorge Vargas was shot outside his West Valley home.

Vargas, 27, who was heading to work, was shot at about 4:30a.m. while starting his truck. Phoenix police are handling the investigation, and Arpaio said very little about the investigation.

“It’s very sad what happened,” Arpaio said. “This unfortunate situation that occurred dovetails somewhat into ... issuing my officers these semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifles.”

Arpaio said the rifles will protect deputies when they face suspects with equal firepower. He said one advantage the rifle has over a handgun is that the AR-15 can fire more rounds than a handgun before requiring reloading.

Many police departments in the Valley equip at least some of their officers with AR-15 rifles, including agencies in Tempe, Peoria and Mesa.

Tempe Police Department spokesman Mike Pooley said the rifles are a must as officers encounter criminals armed with assault rifles. He said the infamous 1997 shootout between armed bank robbers in Hollywood and the Los Angeles Police Department was what prompted most departments to purchase assault rifles.

“They (the LAPD) didn’t have rifles,” he said. “In fact they had to go to a local gun store. They were outgunned.”

Pooley said the AR-15 are superior to handguns because they are more accurate at long distances and will pierce most body armor. He said the shooters in Hollywood had body armor and police bullets were bouncing off them.

2 Mexican teens: Van sold by U.S. gov’t had cocaine

I think that case was in California, maybe San Diego.

Sadly with the insane war on drugs all somebody has to do is plant some drugs on you and the mere presence of an illegal drug makes you automatically guilty of a drug war crime, most which have draconian sentences for a victimless crime that hurts no one.

Source

2 Mexican teens: Van sold by U.S. gov’t had cocaine

Associated Press Thu Aug 8, 2013 1:45 PM

MEXICO CITY — A Mexican family says that a van bought at a U.S. government auction came with an unwanted extra: an undiscovered package of cocaine beneath the dashboard.

Sergio Torres Duarte, 18, and his 19-year-old friend Julio Cesar Moreno were driving to a soccer match in November when they stopped at a routine police highway checkpoint near the Pacific Coast resort city of Mazatlan. They say they were stunned when officers discovered a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine beneath the dashboard of their blue 2004 Toyota Sienna. And they have been in jail fighting drug trafficking charges ever since.

Torres Duarte’s father, also named Sergio Torres, says he bought the van for $3,900 through a friend at a Customs and Border Protection auction in February 2012 in McAllen, Texas.

After his son’s arrest, Torres said this week, he began investigating and found that the van had been confiscated after U.S. customs agents had found five bundles of cocaine while inspecting the car at the international bridge in Pharr, Texas, in October 2011. Every brick of the drug had the word “Good” written with a black marker — just like the one seized by Mexican police, the father said.

U.S. officials acknowledge they might have missed part of the drug.

“Torres Duarte could have had the cocaine without knowing when he was arrested driving the car in Mexico,” said a letter written to Mexican prosecutors by the U.S. Department of Justice attache in Mexico City, Tom Radcliff. Torres showed a copy of the letter to The Associated Press.

The Department of Justice declined to comment, though the spokesman for the customs agency in McAllen, Phil Barrera, said authorities have been investigating since the family began complaining.

It’s not the first time people have been caught accidentally with drugs.

In 2002, Mexican soldiers arrested two men after finding 22 packages of marijuana in a secret compartment of their SUV, also bought at a government auction. An appeals court finally threw out their five-year sentence after ruling the drugs had been hidden since a previous drug bust.

Officials at the federal court office in Mazatlan said the law bars comment on an ongoing case, but Torres said prosecutors are asking for more time to present their case, despite documents and photos showing that the drug seized from the boys is identical to that seized in 2011 at the border.

“We are so angry. We have all of the proof. What else do they want?” Torres said.

Torres said the arrest prevented the youths from graduating from high school this summer with the rest of their classmates.

“They are completely depressed, tired, desperate and anxious,” he said.

A lame excuse to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet

Source

NSA cites case as success of phone data-collection program

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: August 8 E-mail the writer

He was a San Diego cab driver who fled Somalia as a teenager, winning asylum in the United States after he was wounded during fighting among warring tribes. Today, Basaaly Moalin, 36, is awaiting sentencing following his conviction on charges that he sent $8,500 to Somalia in support of the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Moalin’s prosecution, barely noticed when the case was in court, has suddenly come to the fore of a national debate about U.S. surveillance. Under pressure from Congress, senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

Officials have said that NSA surveillance tools have helped disrupt terrorist plots or identify suspects in 54 cases in the United States and overseas. In many of those cases, an agency program that targets the communication of foreigners, including e-mails, has proved critical.

But the importance of the phone logs in disrupting those plots has been less clear — and also far more controversial since it was revealed in June.

Across a dozen years of records collection, critics say, the government has offered few instances in which the massive storehouse of Americans’ records contained the first crucial lead that cracked a case — and even those, they say, could have been obtained through a less intrusive method.

“There’s no reason why NSA needed to have its own database containing the phone records of millions of innocent Americans in order to get the information related to Moalin,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a Senate Intelligence Committee member who has been pressing officials for evidence of the program’s effectiveness. “It could have just as easily gone directly to the phone companies with an individualized court order.” [I suspect that Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wants the government to force private phone companies to do the spy on Americans for the government???]

U.S. officials say that the NSA’s programs often work in conjunction with one another — and that taking away a critical ability such as the “bulk collection” of phone records would undermine the agency’s effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

“You essentially have a range of tools at your disposal — one or more of these tools might tip you to a plot, other [tools] might then give you an exposure as to what the nature of that plot is,” NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis told a Senate panel last week. “Finally, the exercise of multiple instruments of power, to include law enforcement power, ultimately completes the picture and allows you to interdict that plot.”

The NSA collects its vast digital archive of phone records under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. U.S. officials emphasize that those logs do not contain the names of customers or content — just “metadata,” which includes phone numbers and the times and dates of calls. They note that they need a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number they wish to check in the database is linked to a foreign terrorist group.

And they say that without having all the calls in one place and easily searchable with a keystroke, finding links to suspicious numbers would be tedious and time-consuming.

Moalin’s lawyer said he is surprised that counterterrorism officials have cited his client’s case as a hallmark success.

“The notion that this case could be used to justify a mass collection of data is mind-boggling, considering it’s $8,500 that went to Somalia,” said Joshua Dratel, who denied that his client sent money to the terrorist group.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

Needle in a haystack

It was a tip that put Moalin on the FBI’s radar in 2003. But when investigators found no link to terrorism, they closed the case. Then, in 2007, the NSA came up with a number in Somalia that it believed was linked to al-Shabab. It ran the number against its database.

Inglis said officials had no idea whether the number had ties to any number in the United States. “In order to find the needle that matched up against that number, we needed the haystack,” he said.

The NSA found that the San Diego number had had “indirect” contact with “an extremist outside the United States,” FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce told the Senate last week. The agency passed the number to the FBI, which used an administrative subpoena to identify it as Moalin’s. Then, according to court records, in late 2007, the bureau obtained a wiretap order and over the course of a year listened to Moalin’s conversations. About 2,000 calls were intercepted.

Over several months in 2008, prosecutors say, Moalin arranged for the transfer of several thousand dollars to al-Shabab. They say he sent the money to a prominent al-Shabab military leader named Aden Hashi Ayro and other associates. In May 2008, Ayro was killed by a U.S. cruise missile strike.

In 2009, an FBI field intelligence group assessed that Moalin’s support for al-Shabab was not ideological. Rather, according to an FBI document provided to his defense team, Moalin probably sent money to an al-Shabab leader out of “tribal affiliation” and to “promote his own status” with tribal elders.

In 2010, three years after the bureau opened an investigation, it arrested Moalin as he was about to board a flight to Somalia to visit his wife and children.

Prosecutors alleged that Moalin and some acquaintances were sending money to al-Shabab to finance attacks against the transitional government of Somalia and allied fighters from Ethi­o­pia, as well as civilians.

In the calls, Moalin is heard speaking to a man called “Sheikalow,” who prosecutors allege was Ayro, the al-Shabab commander. In one call, Sheikalow can be heard telling Moalin that it was “time to finance the jihad.”

Moalin’s defense attorneys argued that the voice was in fact that of a local police chief from Moalin’s home region, who sometimes goes by the name of Sheikalow. The police chief testified in a video deposition that he spoke with Moalin. The reference to jihad was about fighting the Ethiopians, not the West, Dratel said. He said the men were sending money to help build schools and orphanages.

In February, a jury convicted Moalin and three acquaintances — all Somali immigrants — on conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. Moalin faces up to life in prison.

Identifying threats in U.S.

U.S. officials argue that Moalin’s number probably would not have surfaced — at least not in a timely fashion — had it not been for the database. And they draw a parallel with the period before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

The provision that allowed the NSA to collect phone records has helped thwart “dozens” of terror events, Gen. Keith B. Alexander told a Senate panel.

The NSA, targeting a safehouse in Yemen, intercepted seven calls from hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. But the NSA didn’t know where he was calling from. “Lacking the originating phone number, NSA analysts concluded that al-Mihdhar was overseas,” the Justice Department said in recently declassified reports to Congress on the phone records program.

“In fact, al-Mihdhar was calling from San Diego,” the reports said.

Had the intelligence community known where Mihdhar and a co-conspirator were and detained them, the “simple fact of their detention could have derailed the plan,” the 9/11 Commission said. To close that gap, the government created the phone call database. The goal, the reports say, is to “rapidly identify any terrorist threats emanating from within the United States.”

The NSA could put together a more limited dataset by going to every phone company and asking for all the numbers that have been in contact with a target number. [Again it seems like our government masters want to shift the spying on Americans from NSA to the local phone companies to get around those pesky 4th Amendment problems!!!] But that takes time, and if analysts want to examine secondary contacts, they would have to go back to the phone company, officials said.

Such arguments do not persuade critics, even when the government asserts that the database helped break another case involving a co-conspirator in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system. “In both cases,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said recently on the Senate floor, “the government had all the information it needed to go to the phone company and get an individual court order.”

If time was of the essence, he said, a different court order or administrative subpoena would allow for an emergency request for the records. Wyden noted that both Moalin and the subway plot co-conspirator were arrested “months or years after they were first identified” by mining the phone logs.

The bottom line, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a House Intelligence Committee member, is that even if the program is “only occasionally successful, there’s still no justification that I can see for obtaining that amount of data in the first place.”

Timothy H. Edgar, a former deputy privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that he had pushed for a middle ground solution that would let the phone companies hold the data and perform the link analysis.

“You wouldn’t have this problem of having this massive database in the hands of the government, where the government is saying, ‘Trust us,’ ” said Edgar, who is now at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Affairs.

Following the uproar about the NSA’s far-reaching collection of phone data, U.S. officials have said they are willing to discuss revisions. At the Senate hearing last week, Robert S. Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the administration is open to seeing “whether there are changes that can be made that are consistent with preserving the essence of the program, and yet provide greater public confidence.”

Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program

Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program

By Dana Priest, Published: August 8 E-mail the writer

On the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court place their palms on a biometric hand scanner mounted next to the entrance door. Then the judges and their staff enter a code into door’s electronic cipher lock.

Inside a secure vault — one impenetrable to any sort of technical eavesdropping — the judges review some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive requests for access to private communications information, including the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, a collection that has generated significant criticism since it was disclosed in June.

The court is staffed year-round, and on an emergency basis, to authorize surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Although much attention has been focused on the court’s approval of the NSA’s so-called metadata phone records program, interviews with intelligence officers and experts, public statements and recently declassified documents indicate that the authorization marks the beginning of a long — and, U.S. officials say, carefully regulated — process.

That process, they say, often starts thousands of miles away. During a night raid in Kandahar, Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations commandos might seize a computer belonging to a terrorist cell leader, for instance, and find an electronic phone book on it. An NSA linguist listening to intercepted phone calls from a terrorist in Yemen might hear him talking repeatedly to the same person about a bomb. A Saudi intelligence service might provide the cellphone number of a new, English-speaking al-Qaeda courier to the CIA station chief in Riyadh.

In each case, the numbers would trigger a search of the NSA’s vast collection of Americans’ phone records — even local calls.

The program that collects metadata has been referred to in shorthand as the “215 program” after the section in the law that governs it. It is a search for a needle in a haystack of unimaginable proportions, and administration officials can point to few successes.

The NSA maintains a separate collection program, known as PRISM, that was exposed in June and has been at times conflated with the metadata program. But PRISM is focused not just on terrorism but any foreign intelligence matter. It is especially used to pursue foreign terrorism suspects, foreign espionage cases and investigations involving weapons of mass destruction, and it routinely sweeps up the content of e-mail and social media exchanges involving American citizens, according to documents and interviews.

There is still much confusion about each program, even among people who have been briefed on them, and even among officials involved in carrying them out. What follows is an explanation of the 215, which has generated the most controversy and the most dedicated effort at reform in Congress.

Every 90 days, Justice Department lawyers ask a federal judge to renew the authority to collect the phone records of all Americans by reissuing what is known as a “215 order,” after the section in the USA Patriot Act that government lawyers have determined permits the collection of such records. That blanket order allows NSA analysts to search the phone database for links between foreign terrorists and their U.S.-based contacts.

But to begin a particular search, analysts must submit a request to their superiors showing why there is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the number belongs to a member of a recognized terrorist organization. A reasonable, articulable suspicion is lower than the standard of “probable cause” used in criminal investigations to obtain a warrant or make an arrest. But the suspicion has to be based on facts that a reasonable person would accept. [Yea, like "I work for the government and I think that guy is a scum bag criminal" or "That guy is dating my ex-wife and he must be doing something wrong"]

The analysts’ 215 requests go to one of the 22 people at the NSA who are permitted to approve them — the chief or the deputy chief of the Homeland Security Analysis Center or one of 20 authorized Homeland Security mission coordinators within the Signals Intelligence directorate’s analysis and production directorate. [And as we all know out of the thousands of there requests none has ever been denied by the secret NSA courts run by secret NSA judges.]

Once a request is approved, it is given to one of the Signal Intelligence directorate’s 33 counterterrorism analysts who are authorized to access the U.S. phone metadata collection.

When one of the analysts attempts to log into the database, the computer verifies whether the analyst has permission to do so. Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked details of the program, would not have had such authority.

An analyst’s search of the metadata begins with a foreign number: the number the NSA intercept was targeting in Yemen; the number the Saudi intelligence liaison took from the detainee; numbers found in the computer in Afghanistan that show calls to Europe or the United States.

The analyst then queries the database to see if it contains the number. In 2012, the database was queried 300 times by an NSA analyst.

If the database finds a U.S. phone number, the analyst will begin a “link analysis” chart of all the numbers connected to the original number and metadata about the calls, such as their date, time and duration. The metadata also includes a phone’s routing information, telephone calling card numbers and other identifiers internal to each phone.

It does not include the content of the calls or the names of the phone subscribers. It does not contain information about the phone’s location .

An analyst, for example, might find what appear to be 10 U.S. phone numbers — based on area codes or other identifiers — linked to the original number. The analyst will then use tools such as reverse telephone directories, public search engines and other NSA databases of foreign phone numbers.

Intelligence experts said other factors that could make a phone interesting to analysts are the frequency of calls linked to the initial number or the timing of calls, before or after attacks, for example.

Of the original 10 U.S.-based phone numbers identified, only two might remain interesting to the analyst. Using those two numbers, the analyst searches for all the calls made or received by those two phones. This is called a “hop.” The process often stops at the second hop but can go to a third if the second yields more numbers of interest.

Whatever numbers survive after the NSA analyst’s search are passed to the FBI for further investigation. The NSA gave the FBI 500 numbers in 2012.

The FBI’s job at this point is to find out whether any of those U.S. numbers should be investigated further for links to terrorist organizations or supporters. To do this, the FBI queries its own databases for numbers that are linked to existing bureau cases; or linked to overseas phone numbers known to be associated with other terrorist suspects; or show other foreign connections that raise questions.

The FBI can also search publicly available information, including court records, social media and certain commercial databases, which can give subscribers a person’s Social Security number, past residences and much more.

If the FBI wanted to go further, such as obtaining a person’s bank or credit card records, it would require a court order, warrant or subpoena and then an assessment or investigation probably would occur.

Each NSA database search is audited afterward by compliance officials at the agency. How many phone numbers are searched is reported every 30 days to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Every 90 days, a small team from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence spends a day at NSA looking over 215 documents and questioning analysts. Cursory reports on 215 activity are sent to Congress every year. The last one was eight sentences.

The government says there have been no willful abuses of the system, only a few mistakes. No information has been released about those instances.

Another e-mail service shuts down over government spying concerns

Another e-mail service shuts down over government spying concerns

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: August 9 at 1:30 am

SILENT CIRCLE LOGOA prominent supplier of secure communications services has decided to shutter its e-mail service to avoid having to turn over confidential customer information to the government. The move comes hours after another e-mail service provider called Lavabit made the same decision in order to avoid becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people” — likely a reference to government surveillance.

Silent Circle offers a suite of secure communications tools, including e-mail, chat, and voice calling to customers in 126 countries. The chat and voice services employ “end-to-end” encryption, which means that the company itself does not have the capability to unscramble customers’ communications and turn them over to the government. But e-mail services need to interoperate with other e-mail providers. That makes end-to-end encryption impractical and creates a danger that the company could be compelled to hand over information to the government.

For Silent Circle, that was a major concern because Silent Circle’s business is based on promising absolute confidentiality to its clients. “There are some very high profile, highly targeted groups of people” among the firm’s customers, says Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke. “We felt we were going to be targeted, without a doubt.”

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” the company wrote in a Thursday blog post. “We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.”

Silent Circle’s other communications products, including voice and chat, will continue operating as usual. On those services, “there’s nothing we could turn over” to the government, Janke says. Because the company doesn’t collect information about its customers communications, “there’s nothing we could ever be forced anywhere by any country to do.”

Jannke says his firm has been growing rapidly in the two months since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance. He doesn’t expect the closure of the e-mail service to hamper the firm’s growth. “We’re on track to have between 2 million and 3 million users by the end of this year,” he says.

The closure of the two e-mail services will provide ammunition to those who argue that aggressive spying is jeopardizing America’s leading position in the international market for online services. One recent estimate suggested that U.S. companies could lose as much as $35 billion as fears of NSA surveillance lead foreign companies to cancel their contracts with U.S. cloud service providers.

FCC votes to lower inmate phone rates

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After emotional hearing, FCC votes to lower inmate phone rates

By Ricardo Lopez and Christine Mai-Duc

August 9, 2013, 9:34 a.m.

After a decade of lobbying by prisoner advocacy groups, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday voted to lower inmate phone call rates.

The action seeks to address the exorbitant rates for phone calls made by inmates in jails and prisons across the country. A 15-minute phone call can cost $17, more than 10 times the average per-minute rate for typical consumer plans.

The proposal approved Friday will reduce the cost of phone calls made by prison inmates to a cap of 25 cents a minute for a collect call and 21 cents a minute for a debit or prepaid call.

"It took 10 years, but we are glad that the Commission will secure just and reasonable rates for everyone to protect Americans from unreasonable discrimination," said Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer rights group.

Who works the longest? Jobs with the longest and shortest workdays

Many families of prison inmates paid exorbitant fees for phone calls compared with typical long-distance rates as two telephone companies hold virtual monopolies.

The prison phone market, which brings in $1.2 billion annually, is dominated by two little-known phone companies. Global Tel-Link, based in Atlanta, and Securus Technologies of Dallas, both backed by private equity firms, make up more than 80% of the market, according to Standard & Poor's.

The result is a patchwork of contracts across states and counties, meaning a 15-minute phone call with Securus can cost $17.30 from an Alaska prison or $1.75 from Missouri, one of eight states that have banned commissions.

The companies operate by competing for exclusive rights to serve each jurisdiction, rights often won by promising the highest percentage in commissions. Hungry for revenue, state prisons and county jails have increasingly awarded contracts to companies that can promise more cash. In some cases, commissions account for as much as 60% of the cost of a phone call.

The at-times emotional hearing Friday included testimony from Bethany Fraser, whose children's father is currently incarcerated.

"Under the current rate system, my family struggles to maintain ties," Fraser told the commission.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who supported lowering inmate phone rates under a different proposal, dissented Friday.

Pai had previously proposed a different cap and said that the approved proposal would essentially make the FCC a micromanager and enforcement would be difficult.

The new rules, he said, "may not withstand a court challenge."

Phone companies oppose the changes, arguing they would make an already-competitive market even tougher on their bottom lines.

The companies insist it simply costs more to provide inmate phone services, which require security features such as call screening, restricting phone numbers and blocking three-way calls.

Drug lord ordered freed, sentence in DEA agent's murder overturned

Infamous Mexican drug lord ordered freed, sentence in DEA agent's murder overturned

By Mark Stevenson

Associated Press

Posted: 08/09/2013 09:43:03 AM PDT

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A Mexican court on Friday ordered the release of infamous drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero after 28 years in prison for the 1985 kidnap and killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a brutal murder that marked a low point in U.S.-Mexico relations.

The court overturned Caro Quintero's 40-year sentence for the murder of Enrique Camarena, ruling he was improperly tried in a federal court for a crime that should have been treated as a state offense.

A court official who was not authorized to speak on the record said that Caro Quintero would be released because he had already served his time on other charges.

The 61-year-old Caro Quintero is considered the grandfather of Mexican drug trafficking. He established a powerful cartel based in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa that later split into some of Mexico's largest cartels, including the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

Mexico's relations with Washington were damaged when Caro Quintero ordered Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed, purportedly because he was angry about a raid on a 220-acre marijuana plantation in central Mexico named "Rancho Bufalo" -- Buffalo Ranch -- that was seized by Mexican authorities at Camarena's insistence.

The raid netted up to five tons of marijuana and cost Caro Quintero and his colleagues an estimated $8 billion in lost sales.

Camarena was kidnapped on Feb. 7, 1985, in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state and a major drug trafficking center. His body and that of his Mexican pilot, both showing signs of torture, were found a month later, buried in shallow graves.

American officials accused their Mexican counterparts of letting Camarena's killers get away. Caro Quintero was eventually hunted down in Costa Rica.

At one point, U.S. Customs agents almost blocked the U.S. border with Mexico, slowing incoming traffic to a standstill while conducting searches of all Mexicans trying to enter the United States.

Camarena's fellow U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents consider him a hero in the war against drug trafficking and the El Paso Intelligence Center, where U.S. federal agencies collect information about Mexican drug barons, is named after him.

Caro Quintero is said to have pioneered links between Colombian cocaine cartels and the Mexican smugglers who transport their drugs into the United States.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City had no immediately comment on the court decision.

Man jailed 2 weeks in Phoenix terrorism hoax

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Man jailed 2 weeks in Phoenix terrorism hoax

Associated Press Fri Aug 9, 2013 8:26 AM

An man convicted of endangering his 16-year-old nephew’s life by sending him into a busy north Phoenix intersection dressed in sheets and a scarf and carrying a fake grenade launcher in a terrorism hoax was sentenced Thursday to two weeks in jail.

Michael David Turley, 40, had faced penalties ranging from probation to more than five years in prison after a jury found him guilty in June of endangerment and knowingly giving a false impression in the July 2012 mock terrorism scenario at a Phoenix intersection.

No one was injured but authorities say Turley could have gotten his nephew killed.

Superior Court Judge Jeanne Garcia said it was unfortunate that Turley didn’t tell his nephew to come back into his house rather than go into the streets and carry out the hoax. “It could have been a whole lot worse than it was,” she said.

Turley filmed his nephew pointing the plaster replica of a grenade launcher at passing cars. The youth was dressed in a sheet, had a scarf wrapped around his head and made erratic movements while in a crosswalk, prompting motorists to call 911. Turley posted a video of the hoax on YouTube.

Prosecutor Michael Anderson had asked for 100 days of jail time, saying Turley hasn’t taken responsibility for his actions, even after a jury found him guilty of two crimes. “He is contesting, to this day, the injustice of all of this,” Anderson said.

Turley made a tearful plea to the judge to spare him jail time, often pausing to compose himself, and said he used poor judgment and that he understands the danger he placed his nephew in. He likened his relationship with his nephew to that of a father and son. [If you ask me his only poor judgement was thinking he had First Amendment free speech rights.]

He said his arrest has hurt his career in TV and film production and that the case has financially ruined him. “I have most definitely learned something through this,” Turley said. [He isn't the first person the government has bankrupted by arresting on bogus charges and won't be the last]

Prosecutors say some motorists who saw the teen with the realistic-looking fake launcher had discussions about whether they should run him over. Still, some recordings of 911 calls also showed that some witnesses assumed the weapon was a fake.

Turley’s attorney Brad Rideout had argued the felony case was more like a misdemeanor case in nature and said that those who witnessed the hoax didn’t suffer any long-term trauma.

Turley testified at the trial that his video of the hoax was meant to be satirical and that most passing motorists laughed at them. He told jurors he didn’t think his actions endangered his nephew.

Pot farms on federal land targeted for new penalties

And of course the problem, as usual, is caused by the government morons that made marijuana illegal.

I wonder if U.S. Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema voted for this??? When she was in the Arizona legislator Kyrsten Sinema introduced a bill that would slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Source

Pot farms on federal land targeted for new penalties

By Richard Simon

August 10, 2013, 7:00 a.m.

WASHINGTON — Scientists have likened the illegal marijuana-growing operations in remote areas of the West to leaking chemical-weapons stockpiles, with the heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides posing risks to the environment, including to waterways and wildlife.

In response, Congress is moving to toughen the penalties for cultivating pot on federal land.

The Senate recently approved a measure that would add — on top of the sentence for illegally growing marijuana — up to 10 years in prison for those cultivating the drug on federal land. The measure, a little-noticed addition to the immigration overhaul bill, also calls for new penalties for environmental damage such as that caused by the use of toxic chemicals.

In a rare instance of bipartisanship, a similar measure has been introduced in the House by unlikely allies — freshman Reps. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), a San Francisco Bay-area liberal, and Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), a conservative Northern California farmer. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) is a cosponsor.

California, with its hospitable climate and vast stretches of remote land, had 1 million pot plants eradicated from federal land last year, by far the most in the nation, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Angeles National Forest has ranked in the Top 10 national forests for illegal marijuana groves for the last three years, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Last year, Los Padres National Forest ranked first, followed by Sequoia and San Bernardino forests.

The legislative push follows a recent study that said pesticides used in marijuana-growing operations may be taking a toll on the fisher, a weasel-like mammal. The study found higher mortality rates for female fishers living near marijuana-growing sites in the Sierra.

“Very few people realize that the illegal marijuana gardens in the Western U.S. are not mom-and-pop efforts,” said Craig Thompson, the study's lead author and a U.S. Forest Service wildlife ecologist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station. “But instead they are actually industrial-scale efforts by foreign nationals, using large quantities of toxins that are banned in the United States.”

During a raid last year of an illegal marijuana-growing operation in Sequoia National Forest, authorities found oak trees chopped down to make way for about 10,000 marijuana plants. They also found fertilizers and pesticides dispersed throughout the site, including a banned rat poison.

“These illegal chemicals are poisoning public lands, killing wildlife and endangering people who come in contact with them,” Benjamin B. Wagner, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said last fall after charging the suspects in that case.

Taxpayers often are left with the tab for cleaning up the marijuana-growing sites, officials said.

The tougher penalties were included in the immigration bill at the urging of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who says that Mexican drug traffickers use immigrants brought into the country illegally to cultivate and guard the pot farms.

The measure would direct the U.S. Sentencing Commission to draw up guidelines to increase the punishment for diverting water, using poison or other hazardous chemicals, possessing a weapon or setting a booby trap while cultivating marijuana on federal land.

Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, which promotes legalization, was skeptical that tougher penalties would help end environmental damage.

“In our view, the best way to end destruction of federal land by illicit marijuana grows is not through further criminalization, but through regulation,” he said. “The only permanent solution is taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol. There's a reason we don't read headlines about Mexican cartels growing illicit fields of hops and barley in our national parks.”

While Huffman is cosponsoring separate legislation to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level and leave it to states to decide whether to allow marijuana for medicinal or recreational use, he says he sees no inconsistency in his support for cracking down on marijuana-growing operations that cause environmental damage.

“As we move toward more rational marijuana policies … it’s important that we address the immediate threat to our environment and public safety posed by trespass growing operations,” he said.

richard.simon@latimes.com

Woman acquitted in drug case loses false-arrest suit

Also our government masters have made the court systems rules so complicated that you almost have to have a lawyer to be successful in suing the government.

I suspect that was intentional to prevent us serfs from challenging our government masters.

Source

Woman acquitted in drug case loses false-arrest suit

By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter

August 11, 2013

Sondra Cartwright braced herself on the lectern Friday and stared across the federal courtroom at the corrupt former Chicago police sergeant she says framed her for drug possession.

After questioning Ronald Watts for more than an hour, Cartwright — representing herself in her wrongful arrest lawsuit — looked weary. Her voice had started to tremble and twice she broke into tears. After a long pause, she steeled herself and asked Watts about his reputation among residents of her South Side public housing complex.

"You would agree that the reason everybody knows you the police is because you're a real dirty cop?" Cartwright asked the burly ex-sergeant and convicted felon. The judge immediately interrupted, telling Watts not to answer and striking the question as improper.

A few hours later, after a short deliberation, the jury found in favor of the officers and the city, awarding no damages to Cartwright, who asked for $4 million in her closing argument.

It was an abrupt end to Cartwright's remarkable six-year fight to hold the disgraced Watts and two members of his team responsible for her false arrest, a fight she waged mostly alone, from winning an acquittal at trial in Cook County Criminal Court to refusing a settlement offer and taking her federal lawsuit to trial, all while acting as her own attorney.

After the verdict was announced in U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang's courtroom, Cartwright, 50, tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. As the jury of five men and three women filed out, she gathered her briefcase and papers and quickly left with her brother, George, who had served as her trial assistant.

"That's it, it's over for me," Cartwright, 50, said outside the courtroom. "I just don't know what (the jury) heard."

What the jury didn't hear may have been even more important, including crucial details about Watts' conviction that might have revealed him as a crooked supervisor who used his knowledge of the local drug markets to try to enrich himself.

Watts was arrested in February for stealing thousands of dollars from a purported drug courier in the Ida B. Wells complex who turned out to be an informant for the FBI working an undercover sting. Watts pleaded guilty last month days after resigning from the department. He faces up to 21 months in federal prison.

Jurors hearing Cartwright's lawsuit knew that Watts had pleaded guilty to theft of government property and was no longer a police officer. But Cartwright was not allowed to ask him about the details of his case in part because he faces sentencing in October.

In pretrial conferences, Chang told Cartwright that if she waited until after the sentencing she would likely be allowed more leeway. But she refused to delay the trial.

In addition to Watts' criminal conviction, Cartwright wanted to tell the jury about the sergeant's history of complaints with the police Office of Professional Standards, but since she had not tracked down the accusers, the judge barred the evidence.

During the three-day trial, Cartwright's lack of legal knowledge was painfully evident. She would often leave the courtroom in tears or mutter under her breath during her examination of witnesses. Many of her questions would veer from one point to the next and were so lengthy that attorney Brian Gainer, who represented the officers, had time to slowly rise to his feet, wait a moment or two for her to stop talking, then say, "Objection your honor — improper form, calls for speculation, argumentative and irrelevant." The objections were usually sustained

Cartwright also used several hand-drawn diagrams depicting the scene of the crime, including one with crude stick figures representing the positions of drug dealers and runners. When she tried to use it in her questioning of Officer Alvin Jones, he looked up at the drawing on the projection screen and said dryly, "Ma'am, I don't know what that is, stick figure-wise."

Cartwright was arrested in November 2007 at her building. She claimed she was sitting in her apartment when Watts, Jones and Officer Douglas Nichols pounded on the door and then kicked it in without probable cause. She jumped from the second floor window and ran in fear, she said. Meanwhile, the officers planted drugs outside the window and claimed they were hers, according to her lawsuit.

Jones testified they made the arrest after he chased a man up the stairs and saw him hand three large packages of crack to Cartwright, who then slammed the door and refused to open it when the police knocked.

In his closing argument, Gainer called Cartwright's claims "outlandish" and pointed out numerous discrepancies between her testimony on the stand and statements she made in an earlier deposition.

"She's had her day in court, she's made her accusations, she's told her story," Gainer said. "But this is where it has to stop."

Cartwright acknowledged her lack of legal skills probably cost her but said she did not regret representing herself.

"No attorney would have represented me this far, anyway," she said.

jmeisner@tribune.com

Threats Test Obama’s Balancing Act on Surveillance

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Threats Test Obama’s Balancing Act on Surveillance

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

Published: August 9, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Obama has said he wants eventually to scale back drone strikes and steer the country away from a single-minded focus on counterterrorism. But in response to a vague yet ominous terror warning in recent days, his administration shut down nearly two dozen American embassies and consulates and waged an intense drone campaign in Yemen.

The Obama administration on Friday released documents related to the legal rationale for surveillance efforts.

American officials speak of the need for vigorous debate about controversial National Security Agency programs revealed by Edward J. Snowden, and Mr. Obama on Friday promised greater accountability to keep the surveillance state in check. Yet his underlying message was clear: the expansive monitoring of telephone and electronic communications would continue because the safety of the country depended on it.

America’s war on terrorism may one day end, as Mr. Obama said in a speech in May, but until that happens the president has given every indication that it will be fought in much the same way it has for nearly 12 years. Even Mr. Obama’s promise of more transparency appeared to fail an instant test during his Friday news conference. Asked about the flurry of American drone strikes in Yemen, which have been reported by every news outlet, Mr. Obama demurred.

“I will not have a discussion about operational issues,” he said.

Mr. Obama, who ran for office in 2008 against what he described as the excesses of counterterrorism under President George W. Bush, has occasionally expressed ambivalence about drone strikes and aggressive surveillance. But with Republicans ever ready to pounce with accusations that he has made the country less safe, he has declined to abandon any of the tools used by his predecessor, with the sole exception of the brutal interrogation methods once used by the C.I.A.

The government’s striking response to the reported terror threat in recent days has coincided with a wave of unprecedented skepticism about the N.S.A.’s sweeping surveillance programs since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

When Mr. Snowden began releasing secret documents two months ago, Mr. Obama said he welcomed a debate on the trade-offs of N.S.A. surveillance and privacy. But the debate has grown far larger than administration officials anticipated, with lawmakers of both parties in Congress and half of Americans in polls calling for curbs on the agency.

On Thursday, two small companies providing secure e-mail to customers added their voices. Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they would shut down their e-mail services rather than give in to what they suggested was government pressure to make customers’ messages available to the N.S.A.

In a message on his Web site, Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, said he was forced “to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”

He said he was prohibited by law from explaining what had happened over the last six weeks, but the suggestion was that he was fighting a government demand for access to the e-mail of one or more customers.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a continuing, even escalating impact as journalists have continued to pore over them. On Thursday, for instance, The New York Times wrote that the N.S.A. was examining all e-mail messages in and out of the country and searching them for clues associated with terrorism or foreign intelligence.

On Friday, The Guardian, the British newspaper that has published many of Mr. Snowden’s revelations, wrote about a clause in N.S.A. rules that permits the agency to search for Americans’ names and identifying information in data about foreign targets gathered from large Internet companies.

In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Obama said he was satisfied that the N.S.A. programs were both necessary and respectful of Americans’ privacy. He acknowledged the “instinctive bias of the intelligence community to keep everything very close.” But he said he had urged America’s spies to err on the side of making more details public.

“Let’s just put the whole elephant out there, and examine what’s working,” he said.

On Friday evening, the State Department announced that nearly all of the embassies and consulates that had been closed this week would reopen on Sunday — with only the American Embassy in Sana, Yemen, remaining closed. The consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, will also stay closed, the result of what American officials said is a different threat from the one that had forced the closing of the other diplomatic posts.

With intelligence agencies try trying to piece together information about a terror plot allegedly discussed in recent weeks between senior Qaeda operatives, American drones delivered a flurry of missile strikes throughout Yemen.

Eight strikes have been carried out in Yemen in the past two weeks, a ferocious rate of drone attacks rivaled only by the two-week period after a suicide bomber killed seven C.I.A. employees at a base in Afghanistan in December 2009.

During his speech at National Defense University in May, President Obama said that targeted killing operations needed to be tightly constrained. The United States only carries out strikes against terrorists who pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to Americans, the president said, and only when it is determined it would be impossible to detain them, rather than kill them.

And, Mr. Obama said, “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injure — the highest standard we can set.”

It is yet unknown who exactly was killed in Yemen during the past two weeks. Therefore, it is hard to judge the recent strikes against those standards the president laid out in May. Specifically, did the dozens of people reportedly killed all pose a “direct and imminent threat”? And, with American officials fearing that an attack could happen at any moment, just how much care was taken before each strike to determine that no civilians were in the missiles’ path?

At the very least, this extraordinary period of killing operations in Yemen has revealed just how much the president’s stated inclination to be more judicious about drone strikes is tested in a period of perceived crisis.

Striking a balance between liberty and security is a leitmotif in many of President Obama’s speeches, and on Friday he spoke of “rebalancing” the ledger after the demands of more than a decade of war.

But the changes he announced on Friday were incremental rather than radical — more of what he referred to as “tightening the bolts” rather than dismantling the machine itself.

2 E-Mail Services Close and Destroy Data Rather Than Reveal Files

Source

2 E-Mail Services Close and Destroy Data Rather Than Reveal Files

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

The shutdown of two small e-mail providers on Thursday illustrates why it is so hard for Internet companies to challenge secret government surveillance: to protect their customers’ data from federal authorities, the two companies essentially committed suicide.

Lavabit, a Texas-based service that was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, the leaker who had worked as a National Security Agency contractor, announced the suspension of its service Thursday afternoon. In a blog post, the company’s owner, Ladar Levison, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a secret search order, and was choosing to shut the service to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

Within hours, a fast-growing Maryland-based start-up called Silent Circle also closed its e-mail service and destroyed its e-mail servers. The company said it saw the writing on the wall — while also making it plain that it had not yet received any court orders soliciting user data.

Mike Janke, the chief executive, said the company’s customers included heads of state, members of royalty and government agencies. The company will continue its encrypted phone and text messaging service. Mike Janke, left, and Phil Zimmermann of Silent Circle, who saw the writing on the wall.Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post, via Getty Images Mike Janke, left, and Phil Zimmermann of Silent Circle, who saw the writing on the wall.

In effect, both businesses destroyed their assets — in part or in full — to avoid turning over their customers’ data. Such public displays are far more difficult for large companies to make, and help explain why the most public efforts to challenge secret government orders have come from small companies and nonprofits.

“Providers are in a bind,” observed Orin Kerr, a law professor who specializes in surveillance law at George Washington University. “They need to respect the privacy rights of customers in order to keep customers, but they also have an obligation to comply with the law. A small company can say, ‘Rather than comply with the law, we will go under.’ But Verizon is not going to do that.”

He added: “The government usually has an easier time with large companies because they have more of a long-term need to have good relations with the government.”

Large Internet companies have moved more quietly and cautiously, addressing consumers’ concerns about government requests only after information about secret orders was leaked by Mr. Snowden. This week, technology industry executives and lobbyists attended meetings at the White House.

In an effort to address public concern about the government’s surveillance programs, President Obama on Friday announced the creation of a task force to advise the government about how to balance security and privacy. He also said he supported a proposal to change the procedures of the secret court that approves electronic spying under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The level of secrecy appeared to be a particular frustration for Mr. Levison. On the Lavabit site Thursday afternoon, Mr. Levison said he was legally prohibited from explaining why he had been compelled to suspend operations. “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot,” he wrote.

“This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States,” he added.

Silent Circle’s chief executive, Mr. Janke, said executives at his company — the founders include Philip R. Zimmermann, who created the original e-mail encryption protocol known as Pretty Good Privacy — had opted to follow Lavabit’s example, even before being served with a government order.

He said the incident was a reminder of a fundamental flaw with e-mail technology. An “aggressive” government, he said, can extract e-mail data from any company, no matter how good the company’s encryption tools. Keys to unlock its customers’ encrypted communications had been stored on the company’s servers. Silent Circle destroyed that data, the digital equivalent of a library setting fire to its membership records to keep the government from knowing who checked out what books.

Silent Circle’s text and phone service uses somewhat different technology. The encryption keys are generated between two users as they are communicating and then destroyed. It is aptly called ephemeral encryption.

Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer, applauded Lavabit’s decision, pointing out that its self-destruction was made possible because it had no shareholders to answer to.

“Could you imagine what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page decided to shut down Facebook or Google rather than answer National Security Letters? They couldn’t. They would be fired,” Mr. Schneier wrote on his blog. “When the small companies can no longer operate, it’s another step in the consolidation of the surveillance society.”

Before Lavabit, there was Calyx Internet Access, a small Internet service provider and Web hosting company, that challenged the constitutionality of a secret National Security Letter in 2004. Four Connecticut librarians likewise won their gag order challenge under a so-called National Security Letter in 2006. And a similar challenge was brought by a nonprofit digital library, called the Internet Archive; the government had sought information about one of its users, and it won its challenge to a gag order in 2008.

The most closely watched ruling on secret orders came this year. The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation appealed to a United States District judge to lift a gag order issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation through a national security letter. The court said the gag order was unconstitutional.

Large companies have pushed back more quietly. Yahoo is the only company known to have challenged a gag order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And a coalition of companies, including Google and Microsoft, which sit on a trove of personal communications, have appealed to the Obama administration to be able to disclose just how many Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court orders they receive.

According to Justice Department figures, in 2012, government authorities made 1,856 data requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the vast majority for electronic surveillance, and another 15,229 requests through National Security Letters.

Nicholas Merrill, the owner of Calyx, received one such letter in early 2004 under the Patriot Act. He closed his business within months. “I was terrified they were going to drag me away,” he said Friday.

It took him years to challenge the court order. He still cannot discuss its contents, he can only acknowledge its existence. His actions, he said, were possible only because his company was small and he was not beholden to shareholders. “In a way being a small company is quite liberating,” he said.

Mr. Merrill said he immediately empathized with Mr. Levison’s plight. “I would imagine he feels so strongly about this that he’s willing to sacrifice his own business and he’s willing to risk angering all his client base for this basic principle,” he said. “I can totally relate to where he’s coming from.”

Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of a gag order at issue in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s federal court appeal. The order was issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation through a national security letter, not by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

NSA wants Superman to spy on us?????

U.S. angry over release of Mexican drug lord

Hell, the American government doesn't think people in this country deserve fair trials!!!

Source

U.S. angry over release of Mexican drug lord

By Adriana Gomez Licon and Mark Stevenson Associated Press Sat Aug 10, 2013 7:46 AM

MEXICO CITY — U.S. law enforcement officials expressed outrage over the release from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena but a Mexican federal court ordered his release this week saying he had been improperly tried in a federal court for state crimes.

The 60-year-old walked out of a prison in the western state of Jalisco early Friday after serving 28 years of his sentence.

The U.S. Department of Justice said it found the court’s decision “deeply troubling.”

“The Department of Justice, and especially the Drug Enforcement Administration, is extremely disappointed with this result,” it said in a statement.

The Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents in the United States said it was “outraged” by Caro Quintero’s early release and blamed corruption within Mexico’s justice system.

“The release of this violent butcher is but another example of how good faith efforts by the U.S. to work with the Mexican government can be frustrated by those powerful dark forces that work in the shadows of the Mexican ‘justice’ system,” the organization said in a statement.

The DEA, meanwhile, said it “will vigorously continue its efforts to ensure Caro-Quintero faces charges in the United States for the crimes he committed.”

Mexican authorities did not release the full decision explaining the reasoning of the three-judge panel in the western state of Jalisco, but some experts said the ruling may have been part of a broader push to rebalance the Mexican legal system in favor of defendants’ rights, from both law-enforcement officials and the independent judicial system. Mexico’s Supreme Court has issued several recent rulings overturning cases while saying due process wasn’t followed.

However, Mexican and current and former U.S. officials alike expressed deep skepticism that correct procedures were followed in the decision to free Caro Quintero.

Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said the First Appellate Court had “completely ignored” Supreme Court precedent in dismissing the case instead of referring it to the state courts that appellate judges believe should have heard it in the first place.

He said his office would get involved in the case but offered no details.

Former DEA officials familiar with the Camarena case said they doubted that Caro Quintero walked free simply due to a legally well-founded reexamination of his case. They noted a history of bribery in Mexico and a continuous need for U.S. pressure on Mexican authorities to keep Camarena’s killers behind bars.

Edward Heath was the DEA’s regional director for Mexico at the time of the Camarena killing and was present during the identification of the agent’s body from dental records.

He said Caro Quintero’s release reflected a broader lack of cooperation with the U.S. from the new Mexican government, a contrast with the policy of former President Felipe Calderon.

“You had a president that was working very close with our government in a quiet way. These people come in and so, boom, the curtain comes down,” said Heath, now a private security consultant. “It means a disrespect for our government … This is only six, seven months into their tenure and all of a sudden things are happening, not necessarily for the good.”

He said he was skeptical of the explanation that there was a justifiable legal rationale for Caro Quintero’s release.

“There’s some collusion going on,” he said. “This guy is a major trafficker. This guy is bad, a mean son of a gun.”

Caro Quintero was a founding member of one of Mexico’s earliest and biggest drug cartels. He helped establish a powerful cartel based in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa that later split into some of Mexico’s largest cartels, including the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

But he wasn’t tried for drug trafficking, a federal crime in Mexico. Instead, Mexican federal prosecutors, under intense pressure from the United States, put together a case against him for Camarena’s kidnapping and killing, both state crimes.

“What we are seeing here is a contradiction between the need of the government to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and its respect of due process,” said Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

“The United States wants Mexico to comply with due process but it is likely that due process was not followed when many criminals were caught 10 or 15 years ago.”

Mexican courts and prosecutors have long tolerated illicit evidence such as forced confessions and have frequently based cases on questionable testimony or hearsay. Such practices have been banned by recent judicial reforms, but past cases, including those against high-level drug traffickers, are often rife with such legal violations.

Mexico’s relations with Washington were badly damaged when Caro Quintero ordered Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed, purportedly because he was angry about a raid on a 220-acre (89-hectare) marijuana plantation in central Mexico named “Rancho Bufalo” - Buffalo Ranch - that was seized by Mexican authorities at Camarena’s insistence.

Camarena was kidnapped in Guadalajara, a major drug trafficking center at the time. His body and that of his Mexican pilot, both showing signs of torture, were found a month later, buried in shallow graves. American officials accused their Mexican counterparts of letting Camarena’s killers get away. Caro Quintero was eventually hunted down in Costa Rica.

Caro Quintero still faces charges in the United States, but Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said it was unclear whether there was a current extradition request.

The U.S. Department of Justice said it “has continued to make clear to Mexican authorities the continued interest of the United States in securing Caro Quintero’s extradition so that he might face justice in the United States.”

Samuel Gonzalez, Mexico’s former top anti-drug prosecutor, said the U.S. government itself has been promoting, and partly financing, judicial reforms in Mexico aimed at respecting procedural guarantees for suspects, an approach Gonzalez feels has weighted the balance too far against prosecutors and victims.

“This is all thanks to the excessive focus on procedural guarantees supported by the U.S. government itself,” Gonzalez said.

Phoenix man seeks to recall Rep. Kyrsten Sinema

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema supports the police state Patriot Act???

Kyrsten Sinema when she was in the Arizona legislator tried to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet by introducing a bill to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

When I first met Kyrsten Sinema it was in the anti-war movement.

But it seems that Kyrsten Sinema has sold out the anti-war movement and now supports the police state and military industrial complex.

When I knew Kyrsten Sinema she was also a gun grabber.

Last in almost every election when Kyrsten Sinema has run for office her campaign signs say she is supported by the police unions. I guess that is a good indication that Kyrsten Sinema has sold out to the police state.

Source

Phoenix man seeks to recall Rep. Sinema

By Erin Kelly Gannett Washington Bureau Fri Aug 9, 2013 3:26 PM

WASHINGTON -- A Phoenix man has applied to circulate a petition to recall U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema from office because he does not like how she voted on a measure to prevent the National Security Agency from collecting phone data on Americans as part of its intelligence-gathering efforts.

However, a spokesman for Secretary of State Ken Bennett said the secretary of state’s office would not order a recall election in Sinema’s case even if thousands of signatures are collected because the congresswoman is not bound by the state’s recall law.

In Arizona, some federal officials have signed a voluntary pledge through the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office agreeing to accept the results of any recall election, if one is called. Sinema never signed that pledge.

“Sinema didn’t sign the pledge so the entire process would end without a recall being ordered,” said Matt Roberts, Bennett’s spokesman.

No member of Congress from Arizona, even those who signed the pledge, has ever been recalled.

On Thursday, Phoenix resident Michael David Shipley applied to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, stating his intent to circulate and file a recall petition against Sinema, a freshman Democrat. He listed himself as treasurer of an organization called the “Nullify Sinema Alliance.” Another Phoenix man, Thane Eichenauer, was listed as chairman of the group.

The application objects to the fact that Sinema voted against an amendment to a defense spending bill.

That amendment, which failed after a close vote, was introduced by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., and would have prevented the National Security Agency from collecting most telephone data under the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law. The agency would have been able to collect data only from people under investigation and could not have conducted broader intelligence-gathering efforts in the United States.

Shipley’s application says that Sinema “has broken her oath” to defend the U.S. Constitution by voting against the legislation.

“On July 24th, 2013, (Sinema) chose not to stand with 205 other U.S. House members in placing a limit on government snooping,” the application says. “Kyrsten Sinema chose to reject limits on NSA data collection. In doing this, she supports a ‘Big Brother’ government with no limits. We call on our fellow Arizona residents to support the recall of Kyrsten Sinema.”

Sinema, in a press release issued on the day of the vote, said she voted against Amash’s amendment because it was too broad and she feared it would interfere with the NSA’s efforts to thwart terrorist plots.

“I believe, while well intentioned, that the text of this amendment could interfere with legitimate and appropriate efforts to keep our citizens safe from harm,” Sinema said. “The broad language we considered today could have limited the ability of our national security and law enforcement community to prevent the bombing plot against the New York subway system or to quickly respond to events like the Boston bombing.”

Instead, Sinema voted for an alternative amendment by Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., that prevents the NSA from storing the content of Americans e-mails and phone calls. It would allow the NSA to continue storing phone metadata. It passed 409-12.

“I believe this (Pompeo’s amendment) is a good step forward and that we can find stronger ways to protect our individual liberties,” Sinema said.

If Shipley disagrees with Sinema’s vote, he should run against her rather than trying to recall her, said Sinema campaign spokesman Rodd McLeod. Sinema is up for re-election in November 2014.

“The entire House of Representatives is up for re-election next fall, and if this gentleman wants to run against Kyrsten, it’s a free country,” McLeod said. “He should run.”

Shipley, a 38-year-old Libertarian and local activist, said opponents of Sinema’s vote shouldn’t have to wait until the regular election.

“I definitely haven’t ruled out myself or somebody else I’ve organized with running against her,” Shipley said Friday. “But why wait? Why should we sit and be unhappy and see our wishes thrown under the bus? The time to act is now, not later.”

Under Arizona law, a candidate for the U.S. Senate or U.S. House “may” file with the secretary of state a statement that says, “If elected, I shall deem myself responsible to the people and under obligation to them to resign immediately if not re-elected on a recall vote.”

Federal candidates who sign that pledge and are elected to office “shall be subject to the laws of the state relating to recall of public officers,” according to the Arizona statute.

But Sinema did not subject herself to any state recall laws since she did not sign the Arizona pledge. And a January 2012 report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service says that members of Congress are not subject to recall.

“The United States Constitution does not provide for nor authorize the recall of United States officers such as Senators, Representatives, or the President or Vice President, and thus no Member of Congress has ever been recalled in the history of the United States,” the CRS report says.

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema takes a junket to Israel

Atheist Kyrsten Sinema sells out to the Jewish Christian lobbyists???

Even though US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema is an atheist in this article see seems to have sold out to the Jewish Christian lobbyists. And of course she also seems to have sold out to the military industrial complex which supplies Israel with weapons that they use to terrorize the Arabs.

"Sinema and other Democratic lawmakers were in Israel on a previously scheduled trip paid for by an arm of a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group."

Last but not least US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema attempted to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law down the toilet by introducing a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Source

Political Insider: Irate Goldwater refuses to answer senator’s questions on its ties to ALEC

The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Aug 10, 2013 10:17 PM

Another assault on freedom ... Or so the Goldwater Institute believes, as it sent an indignant retort to a U.S. senator who asked the conservative think tank if it is associated with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.

Specifically, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., wanted to know if Goldwater served as an ALEC member, if it funded ALEC this year and if it backed ALEC’s support of model legislation promoting “stand your ground” gun laws.

The reason for the Illinois senator’s snoopiness? Durbin wrote that he needs the information as he readies a congressional hearing on the self-defense law. He’s also reaching out to other groups that have been identified as ALEC funders.

Goldwater officials fired off a letter that effectively told Durbin to stuff it.

“Simply put, especially in the wake of IRS intimidation and harassment of conservative organizations, your inquisition is an outrage,” wrote Goldwater president Darcy Olsen, litigation director Clint Bolick and policy director Nick Dranias.

They refused to answer, because, they wrote, “as free Americans, that is our right.”

For the record, media reports have identified Goldwater as an ALEC donor.

Sorry, can’t make it, I had other plans ... Wendy Rogers, the tough, bike-riding, Republican Air Force mom who’s hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in the midterm elections, was outraged that her potential Democratic rival missed President Barack Obama’s Phoenix speech this week.

“Disrespectful. Self-serving. In it for herself,” Rogers, who ran unsuccessfully in the primary last year, blustered on her Facebook page. “Today the president of the United States came to our AZ-09 district, yet our congresswoman didn’t even show perfunctory respect by at least showing up.”

Sinema and other Democratic lawmakers were in Israel on a previously scheduled trip paid for by an arm of a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group.

Arizona’s Republican members of Congress were in town. And none of them was at Obama’s speech, either.

He’s the president. ’Nuff said ... The state’s congressional delegation may have missed Obama’s speech, but the Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer’s office were well represented.

The GOP gaggle waiting to get inside the Desert Vista High School auditorium wasn’t exactly thrilled to see Insider and offered different reasons for stepping into the swarm of swooning Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader John McComish said his district includes the Ahwatukee Foothills school, so he was representing his constituents. Senate Majority Whip Adam Driggs said the commander in chief, no matter their party, is a big deal: “It’s out of respect for the office.”

Brewer chief of staff Scott Smith, general counsel Joe Sciarrotta and spokesman Andrew Wilder also attended the speech. But given Brewer’s rather scathing prepared statement that followed — “Our recovery has been made possible in spite of the president’s policies — not because of them” — they apparently weren’t impressed.

State schools Superintendent John Huppenthal arrived early and grabbed a VIP seat with a passel of Democratic lawmakers. He’s the state’s top education official, and the speech was at a school, so that’s a handy excuse if he needs one.

But, really, does anyone need an excuse to see the president?

No resign if I run ... House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, is eying a run for the Congressional District 1 seat. And while he won’t say if he’s in, plenty of others in the political-gossip echo chamber are saying it for him.

Tobin said if he decides to take the plunge, he won’t jump out of the pool that is the Arizona Legislature. Tobin said he intends to remain speaker through the 2014 session, which would coincide with the eight-year limit on his term.

It’s bad form to abandon one office to seek another, he said.

Early prediction: If Tobin does jump into the CD1 race, look for a short session. It’s hard to campaign across a vast chunk of rural Arizona when you’re tied up in Phoenix.

Compiled by Republic reporters Mary Jo Pitzl, Mary K. Reinhart and Rebekah L. Sanders. Get the latest at politics.azcentral.com.

Snowden's father decries 'political theater' over son's leaks

Snowden's father decries 'political theater' over son's leaks

By Christi Parsons

August 11, 2013, 12:07 p.m.

WASHINGTON – The father of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, complained Sunday about the “political theater” surrounding his son’s disclosures of secret surveillance programs and dismissed President Obama’s proposed reforms as “superficial.”

Lon Snowden said he was disappointed with Obama’s promises at a news conference on Friday to reform spying practices and credited his son with spurring the president to act. [Obama hasn't done anything other then spout a lot of hot air on how this is bad, bad, bad. I suspect Emperor Obama will do NOTHING to stop the NSA from violating the 4th Amendment]

“I believe that's driven by his clear understanding that the American people are absolutely unhappy with what they've learned and that more is going to be forthcoming,” Snowden said in an exclusive interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“I believe much of what he suggested is superficial,” Snowden said.

Other critics agreed Sunday that the president might not have acted at all if not for the Snowden leaks. Among the disclosures, Snowden revealed information showing the NSA has assembled a massive database of telephone call logs of virtually every American.

But there was considerable debate about whether the president’s pledge to reform NSA surveillance programs was mainly for show and whether it will quell public concern. [I'm sure it's all for show and that President Obama and Congress will do NOTHING. Well nothing other then spew a bunch of how air about how bad this is and how it needs fixing!]

After weeks of controversy over the spy programs, Obama proposed to put in place greater oversight, more transparency and safeguards against abuse. He also proposed creating a role for a civil liberties advocate to ensure the government will no longer be the only side represented when its requests to conduct surveillance are weighed by the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Obama is also considering changes to the law to limit how much information on Americans the NSA can get and how long it can retain the data.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, said he thinks the president’s reforms are “window dressing.” [I suspect that is also a bunch of hot air coming from Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas]

“The problem, fundamentally, is he’s failed to explain these programs, which are lawful, which have saved lives,” he said, “and now he’s in a bit of a mess.”

But McCaul said he worries that Obama’s idea of adding a privacy advocate to the Foreign Service Intelligence Act court would slow down investigations.

“I’m in a unique position to talk about this,” McCaul said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I actually applied for FISA warrants as a counterterrorism prosecutor, and I think the idea of having a public defender . . . would slow down the efficacy and efficiency of our counterterrorism investigation.” [Yea, and obeying the Bill of Rights will also slow down counterterrorism investigations. I bet you also want to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet in the interest of government efficiency.]

Former NSA director Michael Hayden says he took Obama to mean he wouldn’t really “operationally change” things at the NSA.

Like McCaul, though, he raised concerns about the effect of a privacy advocate before the FISA court.

“Looking through your windscreen when you lay this on, it just looks like more thorough oversight,” Hayden said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “When you’re looking in your rearview mirror after the next successful attack, this runs the danger of looking like bureaucratic layering.”

In the days since Snowden accepted temporary asylum in Russia, avoiding return to the U.S. to face charges for violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property, supporters and critics have argued about whether he is a traitor or whistleblower, a defector or a patriot.

Obama on Friday said that, whatever Snowden claims to have done, he isn’t a “patriot.” [Snowden is a patriot, Obama is a tyrant!]

Snowden’s father said Sunday he thinks the president’s public pronouncements have made it difficult for his son to get fair treatment if he returns to the United States.

“They have poisoned the well, so to speak, in terms of a potential jury pool,” he said on ABC.

“As a father, I want my son to come home if I believe that the justice system that we should be afforded as Americans is going to be applied correctly,” Snowden said.

Edward Snowden’s lawyer, Bruce Fein, said he has secured visas for a visit but declined to say when he and Snowden’s father will travel.

The family has told the Department of Justice that they would like to discuss the conditions under which Edward Snowden would return to the United States.

One thing they have requested is a “venue that was impartial,” Fein said, “because of the history of the Eastern District of Virginia being a graveyard for defendants.”

christi.parsons@latimes.com

Twitter: @cparsons

Teacher's jail term for having sex with boys 'shocking'

You know criminals that hurt people, like robbers, rapists and murders. Not some hot high school teacher that likes to have sex with her students!!!!

Source

Teacher's jail term for having sex with boys 'shocking,' lawyer says

By Richard Winton

July 31, 2013, 5:10 p.m.

A plea deal by the San Bernardino County district attorney that gave a one year jail sentence to an ex-Redlands high school teacher convicted of sex acts with three boys is a betrayal of the victims and would never occur with a male predator, an attorney for one of the victims said Wednesday.

Laura Elizabeth Whitehurst, 28, who gave birth to a child by one of the boys this summer, had faced 41 felony counts of sex crimes with three boys she taught.

With the plea deal, she admitted guilt to six counts -- four for unlawful sexual intercourse and two for oral copulation of a person under 18.

"This is a slap in the face to the victims," said attorney Heather Cullen, whose law firm represents the family of the boy who fathered a child with Whitehurst.

"This is a very short sentence for such crimes," Cullen said. "It's shocking anyone would face so little time for abusing minors. This is definitely being treated differently because they are boys and she is a woman."

Cullen said her client and his family were aware a plea deal might be struck, but never thought it would be so generous.

In addition to jail, Whitehurst must serve five years’ probation, undergo counseling and register as a sex offender for life. She will serve her time in county jail but could be sent to state prison if she violates the terms of her parole, said San Bernardino County Deputy Dist. Atty. Melissa Rodriguez.

Rodriguez cautioned that the goal of the criminal justice system "is both justice and rehabilitation." She said the victims wanted to move on with their lives and the case resolution allows that.

Legal experts say far longer sentences are typically handed out for educators convicted of sex crimes with students. Dmitry Gorin, a former L.A. County sex crimes prosecutor and defense attorney, said two years or more in prison is typical.

But, he added, prosecutors may have considered mitigating information about her background, mental health and the victims' positions.

Cullen said her client's family will pursue other avenues, including civil litigation, to ensure such "injustice doesn't happen to other children in Redlands."

Whitehurst was arrested July 1 on suspicion of having sex repeatedly with a student from Citrus Valley High School. She gave birth in June to a child fathered by the now-17-year-old student, who was present at the birth. The boy's mother complained to school officials.

The case has raised questions about when Redlands school officials first suspected the misconduct by the teacher and how the case was handled.

The district superintendent denied an allegation in the police search warrant that school officials failed to immediately report their knowledge of a sexual relationship between a student and a teacher that resulted in a baby.

The search warrant alleges the district began investigating the accusation six weeks before reporting it July 1 and did not immediately notify Redlands police or social services, as required by law.

After Whitehurst's arrest, two other former students came forward, saying they also had sex with the teacher during her six-year tenure with the Redlands Unified School District.

Whitehurst resigned from her job earlier this month. During a call recorded by police, Whitehurst allegedly admitted to the "ongoing sexual relationship, the birth of the child and [the boy] being the father of the child," according to the July 3 search warrant.

She later told investigators they began having sex at her apartment in 2012.

Whitehurst joined the Redlands Unified School District six years ago as an English teacher at Redlands High and allegedly began sexual relationships with two boys, one who was 14, authorities say. She was charged with sex crimes involving both those boys, who are now adults.

Whitehurst's attorney James Gass described his client as "a clean-cut American girl sitting in jail, so she's having a hard time. But she will be OK."

Prosecutors love to carve notches in their guns

F*ck justice!!! It's about advancing your career as a prosecutor

Source

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Former prosecutor: 'I couldn't work for an office that no longer encouraged me to do the right thing'

By now, the Cook County state's attorney's office is accustomed to the withering critiques of reporters, pundits and activists with their crusading attorneys.

We challenge the prosecutors' commitment to truth — not just locally but in many such offices across the state, where victory and vengeance seem to take priority over justice for the accused. We accuse them of seeing themselves as adversaries of the defendants rather than advocates for accuracy and fairness, which they ought to be given the enormous power they have over the lives of individuals.

And we are accustomed to them sloughing us off or shrugging in sulky defiance even after we reveal grotesque wrongful convictions they've perpetrated.

But now the withering critique is coming from inside the office.

Or, rather, from someone formerly inside the office — Sonia Antolec, who resigned Aug. 1 as an assistant Cook County state's attorney.

Antolec has since delivered several broadsides at leaders of the office, headed by Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, suggesting that politics and public relations are interfering with proper prosecution.

The back story: In late March, a group of teen girls was arrested and charged in a mugging that had taken place on a Red Line CTA train. Antolec was assigned to the case.

"We subpoenaed video evidence," she said in an extraordinary interview last week on WTTW-Ch. 11's "Chicago Tonight" program (embedded and partially transcribed here) "We subpoenaed police records. We called the victims and the witnesses and spoke to them. And there were some red flags that were raised after our investigations."

One red flag? The victim told Antolec that the police conducted their suspect identification lineup with the subjects facing a wall, away from the victim, she said.

Police have denied this allegation.

Another? The images on the grainy surveillance video of the crime caused Antolec to believe that police might have arrested the wrong people. She said she and a supervisor, "zoomed in on the girls. We did enlargements. And we could not match any of the three girls that were on the video to any of the girls that had been arrested."

Antolec said that, in consultation with her supervisor, she elected to drop the case just before it was scheduled to go to trial last month.

About a week later, she said, office higher-ups called her into several meetings, accused her of not following protocol by informing her supervisor of her decision on the day she acted on it, suspended her for three days without pay and demoted her.

"My supervisor was aware of all of the flaws (in the case)," she told WTTW's Carol Marin. "My supervisor was aware what was going to ultimately happen with the case. No one (in the state's attorney's office) has ever said" that there was enough evidence in the case to go forward.

"I specifically asked if I made the right judgment call, and I was told, "Yes you dismissed unprovable cases."

Did she follow proper procedure?

"The first and foremost procedure is that you don't proceed on a case that you cannot prove and that you don't have a good-faith basis for proceeding on," Antolec said.

So rather than accept the suspension and demotion, she quit.

"I couldn't work for an office that no longer encouraged me to do the right thing," she said. "My (12-year-old) son, when he was younger and when I started the job, he asked me if I wore a cape to work because I do what Batman does, and he wears a cape to work. That's what this job meant to me. I was upholding justice. I was seeking justice. It wasn't about convictions, it was about justice."

She added, "While these cases are very important and of the utmost importance, and public safety is of the utmost importance, so are children's rights and so are defendants' rights. ... And so is a prosecutor's oath.

"And when I can no longer walk into work knowing that someone will respect me or stand up for me when I make the right decision, and in fact I'm being punished for making the right decision, that's an employer that I can no longer work for."

Considering the source, it's as damning an assessment of the integrity of the Cook County state's attorney's office as I've ever heard.

A spokeswoman for Alvarez released a response to the Sun-Times, which broke this story, saying only that "clearly defined office policies and procedures were not followed in the manner in which these cases were handled" and that "the law does not permit us to comment beyond that."

Such sticklers!

But the proof will be not in their words but in their actions; whether prosecutors demonstrate that Antolec erred by having the state's attorney's office reinstate the charges — the law does permit the office to do that — and convicting the defendants at trial.

I asked the office about this possibility.

"We are currently evaluating our options as to reinstating charges in some or all of the cases that you inquire about," the spokeswoman replied in a written response. "However, Ms. Antolec's extra-judicial comments in the media regarding the weight of the evidence in these cases may preclude us from being able to do so."

In the court of public opinion, perhaps. But in a court of law, "Antolec's extra-judicial comments in the media" aren't evidence and they aren't admissible.

If the witness ID is solid, as police say, and Antolec's interpretation of the surveillance video is errant, as her suspension and demotion suggested, then oyez, oyez! Bring it on.

But if they don't have a case — if they never had a case — they should say so.

If they admitted it when they were wrong now and then, it would spare the rest of us some trouble.

--------------

Carol Marin wrote a column for the Sunday Sun-Times based on the interview: ‘Heater’ case couldn’t wilt lawyer

Alvarez’s office does not dispute problems with the evidence. What the office does dispute is whether Antolec observed proper protocol in getting the upper echelons of the office to agree to dismiss.

“Whether these cases are bad or not is beside the point,” Alvarez chief of staff Dan Kirk told me Friday. “You have to go through procedures.”

Kirk added that he’s just learned Antolec had been looking for another job before this whole controversy blew up.

Can’t say as I blame her.

What's still missing from Team Anita is a specific explanation of what the "procedures" were and how egregious Antoloc's alleged failure to follow them was. The idea that "the law" does not permit the office to comment beyond the vague assertions they've already made raises yet another question: What "law" are they talking about? What "law" forbids a public official or group of public employees who are attacked from responding with factual information? Did they break that supposed "law" by telling Marin that they'd learned Antolec was looking for another job and thereby implying that she invented the entire controversy?

I'll forward that question to them as well.

After Guantánamo, Another Injustice

After Guantánamo, Another Injustice

By JOHN GRISHAM

Published: August 10, 2013

ABOUT two months ago I learned that some of my books had been banned at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently detainees were requesting them, and their lawyers were delivering them to the prison, but they were not being allowed in because of “impermissible content.”

I became curious and tracked down a detainee who enjoys my books. His name is Nabil Hadjarab, and he is a 34-year-old Algerian who grew up in France. He learned to speak French before he learned to speak Arabic. He has close family and friends in France, but not in Algeria. As a kid growing up near Lyon, he was a gifted soccer player and dreamed of playing for Paris St.-Germain, or another top French club.

Tragically for Nabil, he has spent the past 11 years as a prisoner at Guantánamo, much of the time in solitary confinement. Starting in February, he participated in a hunger strike, which led to his being force-fed.

For reasons that had nothing to do with terror, war or criminal behavior, Nabil was living peacefully in an Algerian guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 11, 2001. Following the United States invasion, word spread among the Arab communities that the Afghan Northern Alliance was rounding up and killing foreign Arabs. Nabil and many others headed for Pakistan in a desperate effort to escape the danger. En route, he said, he was wounded in a bombing raid and woke up in a hospital in Jalalabad.

At that time, the United States was throwing money at anyone who could deliver an out-of-town Arab found in the region. Nabil was sold to the United States for a bounty of $5,000 and taken to an underground prison in Kabul. There he experienced torture for the first time. To house the prisoners of its war on terror, the United States military put up a makeshift prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Bagram would quickly become notorious, and make Guantánamo look like a church camp. When Nabil arrived there in January 2002, as one of the first prisoners, there were no walls, only razor-wire cages. In the bitter cold, Nabil was forced to sleep on concrete floors without cover. Food and water were scarce. To and from his frequent interrogations, Nabil was beaten by United States soldiers and dragged up and down concrete stairs. Other prisoners died. After a month in Bagram, Nabil was transferred to a prison at Kandahar, where the abuse continued.

Throughout his incarceration in Afghanistan, Nabil strenuously denied any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or anyone or any organization remotely linked to the 9/11 attacks. And the Americans had no proof of his involvement, save for bogus claims implicating him from other prisoners extracted in a Kabul torture chamber. Several United States interrogators told him his was a case of mistaken identity. Nonetheless, the United States had adopted strict rules for Arabs in custody — all were to be sent to Guantánamo. On Feb. 15, 2002, Nabil was flown to Cuba; shackled, bound and hooded.

Since then, Nabil has been subjected to all the horrors of the Gitmo handbook: sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, temperature extremes, prolonged isolation, lack of access to sunlight, almost no recreation and limited medical care. In 11 years, he has never been permitted a visit from a family member. For reasons known only to the men who run the prison, Nabil has never been waterboarded. His lawyer believes this is because he knows nothing and has nothing to give.

The United States government says otherwise. In documents, military prosecutors say that Nabil was staying at a guesthouse run by people with ties to Al Qaeda and that he was named by others as someone affiliated with terrorists. But Nabil has never been charged with a crime. Indeed, on two occasions he has been cleared for a “transfer,” or release. In 2007, a review board established by President George W. Bush recommended his release. Nothing happened. In 2009, another review board established by President Obama recommended his transfer. Nothing happened.

According to his guards, Nabil is a model prisoner. He keeps his head down and avoids trouble. He has perfected his English and insists on speaking the language with his British lawyers. He writes in flawless English. As much as possible, under rather dire circumstances, he has fought to preserve his physical health and mental stability.

In the past seven years, I have met a number of innocent men who were sent to death row, as part of my work with the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted people. Without exception they have told me that the harshness of isolated confinement is brutal for a coldblooded murderer who freely admits to his crimes. For an innocent man, though, death row will shove him dangerously close to insanity. You reach a point where it feels impossible to survive another day.

DEPRESSED and driven to the point of desperation, Nabil joined a hunger strike in February. This was not Gitmo’s first hunger strike, but it has attracted the most attention. As it gained momentum, and as Nabil and his fellow prisoners got sicker, the Obama administration was backed into a corner. The president has taken justified heat as his bold and eloquent campaign promises to close Gitmo have been forgotten. Suddenly, he was faced with the gruesome prospect of prisoners dropping like flies as they starved themselves to death while the world watched. Instead of releasing Nabil and the other prisoners who have been classified as no threat to the United States, the administration decided to prevent suicides by force-feeding the strikers.

Nabil has not been the only “mistake” in our war on terror. Hundreds of other Arabs have been sent to Gitmo, chewed up by the system there, never charged and eventually transferred back to their home countries. (These transfers are carried out as secretly and as quietly as possible.) There have been no apologies, no official statements of regret, no compensation, nothing of the sort. The United States was dead wrong, but no one can admit it.

In Nabil’s case, the United States military and intelligence agents relied on corrupt informants who were raking in American cash, or even worse, jailhouse snitches who swapped false stories for candy bars, porn and sometimes just a break from their own beatings.

Last week, the Obama administration announced that it was transferring some more Arab prisoners back to Algeria. It is likely that Nabil will be one of them, and if that happens another tragic mistake will be made. His nightmare will only continue. He will be homeless. He will have no support to reintegrate him into a society where many will be hostile to a former Gitmo detainee, either on the assumption that he is an extremist or because he refuses to join the extremist opposition to the Algerian government. Instead of showing some guts and admitting they were wrong, the American authorities will whisk him away, dump him on the streets of Algiers and wash their hands.

What should they do? Or what should we do?

First, admit the mistake and make the apology. Second, provide compensation. United States taxpayers have spent $2 million a year for 11 years to keep Nabil at Gitmo; give the guy a few thousand bucks to get on his feet. Third, pressure the French to allow his re-entry.

This sounds simple, but it will never happen.

Feds pay millions for border-agent housing in Ajo

Expensive free homes for Border Patrol Police

Source

Feds pay millions for border-agent housing in Ajo

By Brenna Goth The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Aug 11, 2013 11:39 PM

AJO - A cluster of yellow, blue and salmon-colored homes recently sprouted in the desert here, just west of the Spanish Colonial Revival-style plaza and north of the New Cornelia mine lookout.

And taxpayers paid millions of dollars for it.

The federal government spent, on average, more than $600,000 apiece to plan and build the 21 two- and three-bedroom houses and develop the surrounding area to attract U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel to live in this small former mining community. The new homes range in size from 1,276 to 1,570 square feet.

Most similar-size homes in Ajo sold last year for less than $100,000, according to a database maintained by the Arizona Daily Star.

Altogether, the government has paid $15 million for the homes plus 20 park-model trailers in Ajo, according to documents examined by The Arizona Republic.

The homes and trailers are available for CBP personnel and their families to rent at “market rates,” though the agency declined to answer how much that is, citing privacy concerns.

A Border Patrol station is located about 11 miles away in Why, and the Lukeville Port of Entry border crossing is about 38 miles away. Both the Border Patrol and Customs personnel work for the CBP.

The buildup of federal agents on the border over the past several years has caused housing shortages in cities and towns throughout the Southwest, said Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1990s and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. But private industry has filled most needs, making the Ajo project — and the funding it received — atypical, she said.

“There may be a way to understand that,” Meissner said. “On the face, it looks quite startling.”

Tina West, a member of the Western Pima County Community Council, was even more blunt about the more than $2 million the government spent on the trailers.

“You could buy any house in town for $100,000,” West said. “It’s just another multimillion-dollar waste.”

The CBP refused repeatedly to answer The Republic’s questions about the projects. However, in a letter to a local real-estate agent, the agency said the construction cost of the homes was “approximately $167,000 apiece” and the remainder of the money was spent on “acquisitions of various parcels and 12 existing homes; buyout of four life leases; relocation of the private homeowners and rents; excessing or selling the existing homes; design of the new homes and property and infrastructure improvements.”

In a statement to the newspaper, the CBP said the project gives personnel the option to rent “affordable, high-quality, and energy efficient housing.” Housing is not a recruitment tool, the statement said.

Search for housing

Mountains and mine tailings surround this unincorporated area of Pima County, about 40 miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border. Ajo thrived in the early 1900s during the copper boom but was primarily marketed as a retirement community after the New Cornelia copper mine closed in the 1980s because of plummeting prices.

Now, about 4,400 people live here. Most newcomers are teachers, contractors or border-enforcement agents, residents said.

The median sale price for a single-family home in Ajo is $70,598, according to the Pima County Assessor’s Office valuation chart, which used home sale prices from 2010 to 2012 adjusted for current market conditions. Nearly 30 percent of area houses were vacant from 2007 to 2011, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Fewer than 30 percent of CBP employees assigned to the area rented housing from the Ajo market before the construction, according to a U.S. General Services Administration assessment for the Sahuaro Street housing project. Many live in Phoenix, Tucson or Gila Bend and commute an hour or two to the border, which affects staff retention, according to the report.

CBP officials said in letters and reports that there is not enough quality housing for agents to live in the area and ramped up efforts to provide its own.

The most recent project is the development that opened in January on South Sahuaro Street. The GSA awarded Tempe-based Sundt Construction Inc. a contract in 2011 for $10,356,331 to build an enclave of 21 energy-efficient houses, as well as streets and sidewalks.

The houses received a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum rating, according to the GSA. The site is about 11.6 acres and is zoned for an additional 25 houses.

Construction cost more than $11 million in all, according to an analysis of contracts by The Republic. About $325,000 of the extra expenses went toward problems in developing the land, including rock removal and unforeseen soil conditions, and other funding went to upgrading appliances and improving aesthetics.

That total rises to about $13 million including all costs “spent or obligated to this project,” wrote Robin Coachman, a CBP housing and project manager based in California, in a 2012 letter to the editor published in the Ajo Copper News.

Not all of that went to building the houses themselves. The project also included an environmental assessment, purchasing houses already on the land, buying out life leases as well as relocating homeowners. Sundt also constructed a small common area. Sundt referred all questions to the CBP.

Early objections

In 2011, the GSA started leasing land at an RV court less than a mile from the Sahuaro Street project for 20 CBP-owned park-model trailers, which are built for longer stays compared with other mobile homes.

Each trailer cost about $82,000 after the installation of appliances, ceiling fans and other items, according to information that the GSA released to local real-estate agent Linda Sharp under a Freedom of Information Act request. The land lease will cost $436,800 for five years — or about $365 per month per trailer lot.

The CBP would not provide square footage for the trailers or answer how many are occupied to protect the privacy of personnel, the agency said in a statement.

The housing complex is active and was used as temporary housing for CBP personnel displaced by the Sahuaro Street construction, according to a 2013 letter to Sharp from Eugene Schied, assistant commissioner of the CBP Office of Administration.

Plans for the Sahuaro Street project drew a slew of objections early on from local leaders and residents when federal officials asked for public input in 2010. Some were worried that new housing would not fit with the character of the area while others questioned how the construction would affect local landlords who depend on border-personnel business.

But the new housing could be a real incentive for CBP employees to move to Ajo full time — and the area could use their business, said Bety Allen, executive director of the Ajo District Chamber of Commerce. Allen moved to Ajo from Montana with her husband, who is a Border Patrol agent, and said finding suitable rental housing was stressful.

“If those houses would have been there, it would have been so much easier,” Allen said.

There may have been a cheaper way to provide better options, said U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., whose district includes Ajo. He said his office suggested renovating homes already in the area.

“I thought it would be good for agents coming in to be integrated into that part of the community,” Grijalva said. “It would revitalize part of Ajo.”

CBP officials considered renovating 21 separate properties within the community but said it would be more expensive than starting from scratch after the cost of environmental assessments and appraisals, according to Coachman’s letter to the editor. He also wrote that not enough homes were available, based on a market survey completed before the project.

Coachman did not respond to interview requests. Arizona’s U.S. senators, Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, also did not respond to requests for comment.

New homes wanted

CBP’s presence in the area has grown substantially in the last several years. The Ajo station was built in Why in 1987 for about 25 agents, according to the CBP. A new station opened last year that can accommodate 500.

Ajo has more than enough housing, but it might not be what agents are looking for, said Mari Zimmermann, the designated broker for Ajo Realty. Some houses are ready for moving in, but others need fixing up — and most are old.

“Mostly the younger people who come to town want new houses,” Zimmermann said. “We don’t have builders. Houses that are new are built by people who live in them.”

The Sahuaro Street property is zoned and designed for 46 homes but there is no funding or plan to build the additional 25 homes yet, Schied wrote to real-estate agent Sharp.

Immigration reform could change that, former INS commissioner Meissner said. Housing problems are likely to increase if more agents are sent to the border under the current proposal being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives, which could double the number of Border Patrol agents if passed.

“It’s going to be a big, new factor,” Meissner said. “Nothing along those lines has been discussed.”

But not everyone is sure newer properties are enough to draw agents to the area.

Sharp, 63, who rents to several CBP employees, said many agents lease cheap properties close to the border and live full time elsewhere, looking for better schools for their kids, job opportunities for their spouses and the energy of a city.

“Most of them are young,” Sharp said. “They want a nightlife, and there’s no life in Ajo.”

Federal judge orders NYPD stop-frisk monitor

Source

Federal judge orders NYPD stop-frisk monitor

Associated Press Mon Aug 12, 2013 7:06 AM

NEW YORK— A federal judge appointed an independent monitor Monday to oversee changes to the New York Police Department’s contentious policy known as stop and frisk after finding it intentionally discriminates based on race, a significant judicial rebuke for what the mayor and police commissioner have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool.

U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin said in a ruling that Peter L. Zimroth, a onetime city lawyer and a former chief assistant district attorney, has been appointed as the monitor. In both roles, Zimroth worked closely with the NYPD, the judge said.

The judge accused the police department’s senior officials of violating law “through their deliberate indifference to unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches.”

“They have received both actual and constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment violations occurring as a result of the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices. Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations,” she wrote in a lengthy opinion.

She also cited violations of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

“Far too many people in New York City have been deprived of this basic freedom far too often,” she said. “The NYPD’s practice of making stops that lack individualized reasonable suspicion has been so pervasive and persistent as to become not only a part of the NYPD’s standard operating procedure, but a fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods.”

Four men had sued, saying they were unfairly targeted because of their race. There have been about 5 million stops during the past decade, mostly black and Hispanic men. Scheindlin issued her ruling after a 10-week bench trial for the class-action lawsuit, which included testimony from top NYPD brass and a dozen people — 11 men and one woman — who said they were wrongly stopped because of their race.

Scheindlin concluded that the plaintiffs had “readily established that the NYPD implements its policies regarding stop and frisk in a manner that intentionally discriminates based on race.”

The case was the largest and most broad legal action against the policy at the nation’s biggest police department, and may have an effect on how other police departments make street stops, legal experts said.

City lawyers argued the department does a good job policing itself with an internal affairs bureau, a civilian complaint board and quality assurance divisions.

The city had no immediate response to the ruling.

Attorney General Holder blows hot air on fixing American police state

I suspect this is mostly hot air coming from Eric Holder and almost none of the issues he talks about will be fixed. That's because only Congress has the power to make the fixes. It's all propaganda to make the voters think the Obama gang is doing something great.

The article does admit that almost half of the people in prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I think that number is low because other federal government statistics say OVER half the people in American prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes.

"More than 219,000 federal inmates are behind bars, and almost half of them are serving time for drug-related crimes"

Holder seeks to avert mandatory minimum sentences for some low-level drug offenders

By Sari Horwitz, Published: August 11 E-mail the writer

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is set to announce Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder will reveal in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to senior department officials. He is also expected to introduce a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.

Justice Department lawyers have worked for months on the proposals, which Holder wants to make the cornerstone of the rest of his tenure.

“A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities,” Holder plans to say Monday, ­according to excerpts of his ­remarks that were provided to The Washington Post. “However, many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem rather than alleviate it.”

Holder is calling for a change in Justice Department policies to reserve the most severe penalties for drug offenses for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers. He has directed his 94 U.S. attorneys across the country to develop specific, locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.

“Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason,” Holder plans to say. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.”

The attorney general can make some of these changes to drug policy on his own. He is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences. Under certain statutes, inflexible sentences for drug crimes are mandated regardless of the facts or conduct in the case, reducing the discretion of prosecutors, judges and juries.

Some of Holder’s other initiatives will require legislative change. Holder is urging passage of legislation with bipartisan support that is aimed at giving federal judges more discretion in applying mandatory minimum sentences to certain drug offenses.

“Such legislation will ultimately save our country billions of dollars,” Holder said of legislation supported by Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable.”

The cost of incarceration in the United States was $80 billion in 2010, according to the Justice Department. While the U.S. population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown by about 800 percent. Justice Department officials said federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent over capacity.

Federal officials attribute part of that increase to mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including marijuana, under legislation passed in the 1980s. Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for example, a minimum sentence of five years without parole was mandated for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, while the same sentence was mandated for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine, law enforcement officials said, pointing to discrepancies that they say have led to higher levels of incarceration in poorer communities.

“Sentencing by mandatory minimums is the antithesis of rational sentencing policy,” American Bar Association lawyer James E. Felman said in testimony three years ago before the U.S. Sen­tencing Commission.

Although the United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in American prisons, according to the Justice Department. More than 219,000 federal inmates are behind bars, and almost half of them are serving time for drug-related crimes.

An additional 9 million to 10 million people cycle through local jails in the United States each year. About 40 percent of former federal prisoners and more than 60 percent of former state prisoners are rearrested or have their supervision revoked within three years after their release, often for technical or minor violations of the terms of their release.

Holder will say he has also revised the department’s prison policy to allow for more compassionate releases of elderly inmates who did not commit violent crimes, have served significant portions of their sentences and pose no threat to the public.

Over the next weeks, Holder and his deputies plan to visit cities to promote their prison agenda and point to examples of the type of change the attorney general is advocating.

New legislation in Kentucky, for example, has reserved prison beds for only the most serious criminals, focusing resources instead on community supervision and other alternatives. The state is projected to reduce its prison population by more than 3,000 over the next 10 years, saving more than $400 million, according to Justice Department officials.

Investments in drug treatment for nonviolent offenders and changes to parole policies helped Arkansas reduce its prison population by more than 1,400 inmates, U.S. officials said, and led to a reduction in the prison population of more than 5,000 inmates last year in Texas.

Holder does not plan to announce any changes in the Justice Department’s policy on marijuana, which is illegal under federal law. Two states, Colorado and Washington, legalized marijuana in November. Supporters of the measures argued that hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted on a failed war against marijuana that has filled American prisons will low-level offenders.

Supporters also contended that decriminalization would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue that could be used for education, health care and other government services.

But the legalization measures directly violate the federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits the production, possession and sale of marijuana and classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, putting it in the same category as LSD and heroin. The Justice Department has not said how it will respond to the measures in Colorado and Washington, leaving state and local officials confused about exactly how to proceed. A Justice Department spokesman said the matter is still under review.

Stop-and-Frisk Practice Violated Rights, Judge Rules

Stop-and-Frisk Practice Violated Rights, Judge Rules

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Published: August 12, 2013 149 Comments

In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.

In a decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that police officers have for years been systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Officers often frisked these people, usually young minority men, for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband, like drugs, before letting them go, according to the 195-page decision.

These stop-and-frisk episodes, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, according to the ruling. It also found violations with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Judge Scheindlin found that the city “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling by targeting racially defined groups for stops based on local crime suspect data.” She rejected the city’s arguments that more stops happened in minority neighborhoods solely because those happened to have high-crime rates.

“I also conclude that the city’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” she wrote.

Noting that the Supreme Court had long ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were constitutionally permissible under certain conditions, the judge stressed that she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk. The purpose of the remedies addressed in this opinion is to ensure that the practice is carried out in a manner that protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much needed police protection.”

City officials did not immediately comment on the ruling, or on whether they planned to appeal. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg scheduled a news conference at 1 p.m. to discuss the decision.

To fix the constitutional violations, the judge designated an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.

Judge Scheindlin also ordered a number of other remedies, including a pilot program in which officers in at least five precincts across the city will wear body-worn cameras in an effort to record street encounters. She also ordered a “joint remedial process” — in essence, a series of community meetings — to solicit public input on how to reform stop-and-frisk.

The decision to install Mr. Zimroth, a partner in the New York office of Arnold & Porter, LLP, and a former corporation counsel and prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, will leave the department under a degree of judicial control that is certain to shape the policing strategies under the next mayor.

Relying on a complex statistical analysis presented at trial, Judge Scheindlin found that the racial composition of a census tract played a role in predicting how many stops would occur.

She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the cities. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”

“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” the judge wrote. During police stops, she found, blacks and Hispanics “were more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”

The ruling, in Floyd v. City of New York, follows a two-month nonjury trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan earlier this year over the department’s stop-and-frisk practices.

Judge Scheindlin heard testimony from about a dozen black or biracial men and a woman who described being stopped, and she heard from statistical experts who offered their conclusions based on police paperwork describing some 4.43 million stops between 2004 and mid-2012. Numerous police officers and commanders testified as well, typically defending the legality of stops and saying they were made only when officers reasonably suspected criminality was afoot.

While the Supreme Court has long recognized the right of police officers to briefly stop and investigate people who are behaving suspiciously, Judge Scheindlin found that the New York police had overstepped that authority. She found that officers were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop.

“Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” she wrote.

She noted that about 88 percent of the stops result in the police letting the person go without an arrest or ticket, a percentage so high, she said, that it suggests there was not a credible suspicion to suspect the person of criminality in the first place.

Mom resumes lawsuit in son’s border killing

Mom resumes lawsuit in son’s border killing

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Aug 12, 2013 11:16 PM

The mother of a teenager shot to death two years ago by a Border Patrol agent said Monday she’ll resume a federal lawsuit against Customs and Border Protection for negligence in her son’s death. She and her attorneys also called on federal officials to change policies that dictate when agents can use deadly force.

Last year, a federal district court judge in Tucson stayed a suit filed by attorneys for Guadalupe Guerrero against Customs and Border Protection. The judge put the suit on hold pending a Department of Justice investigation into the shooting of Guerrero’s son, Carlos LaMadrid, 19, by Border Patrol agent Lucas Tidwell on March 21, 2011.

Late Friday, Justice officials announced that the department would pursue neither criminal nor civil charges against Tidwell, nor against another agent who fatally shot Ramses Barron Torres, 17, in January 2011 in Nogales, Sonora.

In both cases, agents said people were throwing rocks at them when they fired. LaMadrid was a U.S. citizen; Barron Torres was a Mexican citizen.

Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers have killed 18 people along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2010; in nine of the cases, agents alleged that they fired in self-defense at people throwing rocks.

Guerrero said she was surprised and disappointed by the Justice Department’s decision. While her son had been fleeing from Douglas police and the Border Patrol, who believed he was smuggling drugs, “it didn’t give them the right to shoot and kill him,” she said in a phone interview Monday.

“They need to explain why that agent fired,” she said.

She noted that Justice officials said the evidence showed her son wasn’t throwing rocks but was climbing a ladder against the border fence when he was shot four times in the back and thigh.

Justice officials didn’t respond to interview requests by The Arizona Republic; but a department press release stated that “LaMadrid was in the line of fire,” and that “there is insufficient evidence ... to disprove that the agent was acting in self-defense when he fired at the rock thrower and mistakenly struck the victim.”

The Justice Department statement also said that a videotape of the incident showed someone on top of the fence “making an overhand throwing motion as the victim ascends the ladder.”

Jesus Romo, Guerrero’s attorney, said they have not yet seen that videotape. In his most recent of several orders staying Guerrero’s suit, Judge Raner Collins ordered U.S. Customs and the Border Patrol to provide Guerrero’s attorneys with a copy of the investigative report once the investigation was complete. But on Monday, Romo said that when he asked officials on Friday for a copy of the report, they told him to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

Over the past 10 months, The Republic has filed 66 Freedom of Information Act requests and appeals to various government agencies regarding shootings by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the agency’s use-of-force policy. To date, The Republic has received heavily redacted documents from one case. The paper has not received any documents in the LaMadrid or the Barron Torres cases.

The Border Patrol says that it follows Department of Homeland Security policies and that agents are allowed to use deadly force to defend themselves or others from potentially deadly weapons such as rocks.

In response to a FOIA request by the American Civil Liberties Union, CBP released 37 pages of documents regarding its use-of-force policies and training, in which all the text except the chapter headings is blacked out.

Barron Torres allegedly was one of four youths in Mexico throwing rocks at agents at 3 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2011, to distract them as they chased a man believed to be smuggling drugs. According to the Department of Justice, the agents ordered the men in Spanish to stop throwing rocks. When they didn’t stop, an agent fired at Barron Torres and killed him.

The Justice Department stated that a videotape of the incident showed the youth making a throwing motion with his right arm before he was struck.

Justice officials, in a statement, said that the department lacks jurisdiction to prosecute the agent who killed Barron Torres because the youth wasn’t in the United States and that there was insufficient evidence to disprove the agent’s claim he shot Barron Torres in self-defense.

Holder is targeting lengthy mandatory drug sentences

You have to remember the "war on drugs" is a jobs program for a huge number of very well paid cops, prosecutors, probation officers, prison guards, judges and other government bureaucrats who will do everything they can to prevent this from happening. Even if the "drug war" is evil, they don't want to end it, because ending the "war on drugs" will end their high paying jobs.

Source

Holder is targeting lengthy mandatory drug sentences

By Pete Yost and Paul Elias Associated Press Mon Aug 12, 2013 9:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder announced a major shift Monday in federal sentencing policies, targeting long mandatory terms that he said have flooded the nation’s prisons with low-level drug offenders and diverted crime-fighting dollars that could be far better spent.

If Holder’s policies are implemented aggressively, they could mark one of the most significant changes in the way the federal criminal-justice system handles drug cases since the government declared a war on drugs in the 1980s.

As a first step, Holder has instructed federal prosecutors to stop charging many non-violent drug defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences. His next step will be working with a bipartisan group in Congress to give judges greater discretion in sentencing.

“We will start by fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,” Holder told the American Bar Association in San Francisco.

There are currently more than 219,000 federal inmates, and the prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity. Holder said the prison population “has grown at an astonishing rate — by almost 800 percent” since 1980. Almost half of the inmates are serving time for drug-related crimes.

Holder said he also wants to divert people convicted of low-level offenses to drug-treatment and community-service programs and expand a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.

The speech drew widespread praise, including from some of the people Holder will need most — Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he is encouraged by the Obama administration’s view that mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders promote injustice and do not serve public safety.

Paul and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have introduced legislation to grant federal judges greater flexibility in sentencing. Leahy commended Holder for his efforts on the issue and said his committee will hold a hearing on the bill next month.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he looks forward to working on the issue with Holder and senators of both parties.

But support was not universal. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Holder “cannot unilaterally ignore the laws or the limits on his executive powers. While the attorney general has the ability to use prosecutorial discretion in individual cases, that authority does not extend to entire categories of people.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said whether the law needs to be changed should be decided by Congress, along with the president.

“Instead, we’re seeing the president attempt to run roughshod over the direct representatives of the people elected to write the laws,” Grassley said. “The overreach by the administration to unilaterally decide which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore is a disturbing trend.”

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., agreed that Holder should not have taken the action without congressional approval.

“While reducing mandatory minimums may be good policy, I hope the attorney general fully understands that Congress should address the issue through legislation,” Gosar said. “As I have repeatedly said, the attorney general does not get to pick which laws to enforce and which ones to toss out of the window.”

But Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said the Obama administration had to act in part because Congress has failed to do so.

“This is another example of the president having to step in on a volatile but important issue because of a lack of action by Congress,” Grijalva said. “We have bills before us on this issue all the time — and I support them — but they don’t even get a hearing. ... I think what Holder did is a wise move and, frankly, overdue.”

The impact of Holder’s initiative could be significant, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a private group involved in research and policy reform of the criminal-justice system.

African-Americans and Hispanics probably would benefit the most from a change. Black people account for about 30 percent of federal drug convictions each year and Hispanics account for 40 percent, according to Mauer.

If state policymakers were to adopt similar policies, the impact of changes at the state level could be even broader. Currently, about 225,000 state prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

One national survey from 15 years ago by the Sentencing Project indicated that 58 percent of state drug offenders had no history of violence or high-level drug dealing.

“These proportions on state prisoners may have shifted somewhat since that time, but it’s still likely that a substantial proportion of state drug offenders fall into that category today,” Mauer said.

Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., said he would support such legislation if it came before the House.

“I’ve always felt that mandatory sentencing was not something I supported,” Pastor said. “I feel that a judge should have the discretion to mitigate a sentence or impose a harsher one depending on the circumstances and the facts of the case. That’s the way to ensure that justice is served.”

Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., said something must be done to reduce prison overcrowding and save taxpayers’ dollars.

“As a former prosecutor, I know how important it is to crack down on criminals and keep our communities safe,” Kirkpatrick said. “But when our prisons are needlessly overcrowded, taxpayers are stuck with the tab. I support efforts to find a common-sense solution to this problem, and I’ll be taking a closer look at what the attorney general is proposing.”

In a three-page memo to all 94 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country, Holder said rising prison costs have resulted in reduced spending on law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and prevention and intervention programs.

“These reductions in public-safety spending require us to make our public-safety expenditures smarter and more productive,” the memo stated.

In some cases where a defendant is not an organizer, leader, manager or supervisor of others, “prosecutors should decline to pursue charges triggering a mandatory minimum sentence,” Holder’s memo said.

In his speech to the ABA, the attorney general said, “We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate — not merely to convict, warehouse and forget.”

Holder said new approaches, which he is calling the “Smart on Crime” initiative, are the result of a Justice Department review he launched early this year.

The attorney general said that some issues are best handled at the state or local level and that he has directed federal prosecutors across the country to develop locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.

He said 17 states have directed money away from prison construction and toward programs and services such as treatment and supervision that are designed to reduce the problem of repeat offenders.

In Kentucky, legislation has reserved prison space for the most serious offenders and refocused resources on community supervision. The state, Holder said, is projected to reduce its prison population by more than 3,000 over the next 10 years, saving more than $400 million.

He also cited investments in drug treatment in Texas for non-violent offenders and changes to parole policies, which he said brought about a reduction of more than 5,000 in the prison population last year.

He said similar efforts helped Arkansas reduce its prison population by more than 1,400. He also pointed to Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Hawaii as states that have improved public safety while preserving limited resources.

San Francisco County District Attorney George Gascón applauded Holder’s speech. “It’s obviously a big shift in policy,” Gascón said. “Now, let’s see how the follow- through works.”

In a state experiencing severe prison overcrowding, Gascón has been advocating “alternative” sentencing of low-level drug offenders since taking office as district attorney in January 2011. He previously served as the city’s police chief.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to delay the early release of nearly 10,000 California inmates by year’s end to ease overcrowding at 33 adult prisons.

Praising Holder’s efforts, Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office, said the attorney general “is taking crucial steps to tackle our bloated federal mass-incarceration crisis.”

Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said, “For the past 40 years, the Department of Justice, under both political parties, has promoted mandatory minimum sentencing like a one-way ratchet.”

Former federal appellate Judge Timothy Lewis recalled that he once had to sentence a 19-year-old to 10 years in prison for conspiracy for being in a car where drugs were found.

Lewis, also a former prosecutor, said the teen, who was Black, was on course to be the first person in his family to go to college. Instead, Lewis had to send him to prison as the teen turned and screamed for his mother.

“I am just glad that someone finally has the guts to stand up and do something about what is a pervasively racist policy,” said Lewis, who is African-American.

Erin Kelly of the Republic Washington Bureau contributed to this article.

Border Patrol shouldn’t shoot at will

Border Patrol shouldn’t shoot at will

In Third World countries, the police operate with impunity. [And they also operate with impunity in the USA!!!]

The same should not be true of America’s national police force along the Arizona-Mexico border. [but sadly it is!!!]

Last week’s decision by the Justice Department not to prosecute Border Patrol agents in two separate fatal shootings along the border should rankle those who like their cops to be a little nervous about human rights.

It took two years of investigations for the feds to exonerate themselves.

The shooting of Carlos LaMadrid, 19, happened in Douglas, Ariz., on March 21, 2011. He was allegedly seen loading bundles of drugs into a vehicle. He fled, ran to the fence and was shot four times. The DOJ report says he got between the Border Patrol and someone who was throwing rocks from the Mexican side.

LaMadrid was a U.S. citizen.

According to a press release from the Justice Department: “While a civilian witness who climbed up the ladder behind the victim stated that he did not see anyone throwing rocks at the time of the shooting, his account is contradicted by the physical, testimonial and video evidence.”

Drug offenses are not capital crimes. But this kid is dead. [Technically you are right, but p*ss off a cop and you could be dead meat. And when it's business as usual nothing will happen to the pig that committed the murder. As in this case.]

The shooting of Ramses Barron Torres, 17, happened in Nogales on Jan. 5, 2011.

Again, there were allegedly drugs being moved across the border. Again rocks were thrown. Again, the feds took a very long time to come to the conclusion that the federal police force would not be held accountable.

According to DOJ’s press release:

“The Department of Justice lacks jurisdiction to prosecute the agent who fired at Barron-Torres under the federal criminal civil rights statute pertaining to use of force under color of law, because the statute requires that the victim be in the United States when he was injured. Here, Barron-Torres was on the Mexico side of the border fence when he was shot.”

That does not bode well for another case that has not been resolved.

Sixteen-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was allegedly throwing rocks from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, when he was shot in October 2012.

He was hit multiple times, and an autopsy showed most of the bullets hit him from behind.

“The only way I can fathom that report is that he was lying on his face when he was hit,” said Luis Parra, an attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family told Republic reporter Bob Ortega.

The FBI says the investigation is ongoing.

But the outcome of the previous two investigations makes it look like the wheels are greased in the Border Patrol’s favor.

That’s too bad.

I have great respect for what the Border Patrol does. Agents face dangers in the desert. They also rescue innocent people who get in bad, bad situations because of criminal smugglers. [Well the root cause it the laws the prevent hard working people who want to better their lives from crossing the border and coming to the USA. So blame the politicians who passed those laws for the deaths. The criminal smugglers are just committing victimless crimes to help people better their lives. ]

I don’t think all Border Patrol agents are trigger-happy goons. But in any police force that’s been growing as fast as the Border Patrol, there are bound to be some agents who get carried away with their power.

So it’s in everybody’s interest if there are consequences when kids are killed.

Otherwise, we’re all a little less safe from the law enforcement agencies we pay.

Confession at center of Doody retrial

A speedy fair trial in the Buddhist Tempe murders??? Don't make me laugh

1) The confessions from the four Tucson kids (Mike McGraw, Leo Bruce, Mark Nunez, and Dante Parker) were almost certainly obtained using the "9 Step Reid Method". The "9 Step Reid Method" is just an improved form of beating people with rubber hoses to get confessions. The "9 Step Reid Method" replaces real rubber hoses with psychological rubber hoses. Innocent people routinely make false confessions when integrated with the "9 Step Reid Method".

The Tucson kids were released after spending a year in the Maricopa County jail when it was discovered that Alessandro Garcia and Jonathan Doody had the gun that the murders were committed with.

The Tucson kids later received settlements from Maricopa County for false arrest.

2) The confessions from Alessandro Garcia and Jonathan Doody were also almost certainly obtained using the "9 Step Reid Method". Again the "9 Step Reid Method" is a lot like beating people with psychological rubber hoses to get a confession. And again innocent people routinely make false confessions when integrated with the "9 Step Reid Method".

3) I not joking about this, but the Tucson kids were arrested when the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office got a tip from Mike McGraw, a guy in a mental institution in Tucson, who said he know who committed the murders in Phoenix. Yes, a tip from a guy in a nut house in Tucson, who out of the blue called the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and said he knew who committed the worst murders in the history of Maricopa County.

The 4 kids from Tucson were taken to Phoenix by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office where they were coerced into giving false confessions.

Source

Confession at center of Doody retrial

Jonathan Doody’s earlier murder convictions were overturned.

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Aug 13, 2013 1:24 AM

The murders 22 years ago of nine people at a West Valley Buddhist temple stand as one of the most brazen and shocking cases in Arizona history.

On Aug. 10, 1991, investigators found six monks, a nun and two helpers lying facedown and grouped together in a circle, their heads pointing inward like spokes in a wheel, at the Wat Promkunaram Temple in Waddell. Some of their hands were clasped in prayer. They were drenched in blood from head wounds made by .22-caliber bullets and shotgun blasts to torsos, arms and legs.

Six people confessed to the crimes under intense interrogation, and two West Valley teens were convicted of the murders in 1993. One pleaded guilty, the other was found guilty by a jury.

On Monday, five years after his conviction was overturned, Johnathan Doody’s retrial began with jury selection in Maricopa County Superior Court. A panel of about 150 potential jurors was whittled to 46. Jury selection continues today.

This time, defense attorney Maria Schaffer said, “we intend to show that Mr. Doody was not present during the murders.”

“He was not there,” she said.

Doody was 17 when he was arrested in the case in October 1991. Doody, now 39, has been incarcerated ever since.

It’s a case that forever changed police-interrogation techniques and the face of Arizona politics, Schaffer said. [Bullsh*t it didn't change ANYTHING. Almost ALL the police departments in the USA routinely use the "9 Step Reid Method" to get confessions today. Despite the fact that the "9 Step Reid Method" is nothing more then a psychological version of beating people with rubber hoses to get confessions and routinely gets false confessions. Google "9 Step Reid Method" and you will find out what I am talking about] It helped elect Sheriff Joe Arpaio to his first term in office in 1992, she said. He campaigned on the claim that he would not extract confessions the way his rival, then-Sheriff Tom Agnos, reportedly did. [That's just one of the many lies Sheriff Joe has told us.]

Sheriff’s investigators under Agnos took thousands of photos and fingerprints.

Their first solid lead, a September 1991 tip, resulted in the arrests of five men in Tucson. Four confessed and became known as the “Tucson Four.” [Solid lead??? As I said it was a call from a guy in a MENTAL INSTITUTION in Tucson!!!!]

Investigators pleaded, cajoled, threatened and lied to them until they were willing to say anything, reports say. [Yea, that sounds exactly how the "9 Step Reid Method" works!]

Those confessions were found to be false about a month later, when investigators tied a .22-caliber gun to the murders. It was a gun none of the four owned.

The weapon was linked to Alessandro “Alex” Garcia and to Doody, then a high-school junior. Investigators approached Doody during a football game. He went with them willingly.

Doody was subjected to a 12-hour interrogation by officers who used the same techniques on Doody that they used to get false confessions from the Tucson Four, according to Alan Dershowitz, Doody’s then-attorney. [Again that is typical of how the "9 Step Reid Method" works]

“They used every trick in the book,” Dershowitz said several years ago. “They denied him the right to have a parent there. They created the circumstances for false confession, and they got it — a false confession.” [Again that is typical of how the "9 Step Reid Method" works]

Garcia also confessed. He later pleaded guilty in a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid the death penalty if he testified against Doody. He was sentenced to 271 years in prison, 10 fewer than Doody’s sentence of 281 years.

In 2008, 15 years after Doody was found guilty, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, ruling that his confession was coerced. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, paving the way for Doody’s retrial.

In the years since the first trial, six witnesses have died, Schaffer said. The key to the prosecution case, Garcia, is in prison, Schaffer said. “Basically, what we are going to tell the jurors is that Garcia is not truthful,” Schaffer said.

The Maricopa County Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment Monday.

Opening arguments are scheduled for Aug. 21.

Here is a quote from the following article on the big break in the case which was a call from a Tucson mental institution.

"Then, one month after the killings came what seemed like the big break. Tucson mental-hospital patient Mike McGraw, 24, on Sept. 10, 1991, called sheriff's investigators. He said he knew who had done it and he named names.

Soon, Tucson police had picked up McGraw and several friends: Leo Bruce, then 28, Mark Nunez, 19, Dante Parker, 20, and Victor Zarate, 28. All were taken to Phoenix and grilled from 9 p.m. to dawn daily, from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13."

Source

Valley Buddhist temple massacre has had lasting impact

by William Hermann - Aug. 14, 2011 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

The slaying 20 years ago of nine people at a West Valley Buddhist temple, while tragic in its own right, also changed the face of Arizona politics and still shines a light on the issue of police interrogation techniques.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio may well owe his first election victory, in 1992, to then-Sheriff Tom Agnos' staff bungling the investigation into the Aug. 9, 1991, murders at the Wat Promkunaram Temple. Arpaio has become a key figure in Arizona politics, using his influence to get others elected and playing a key role in making illegal immigration a state and national issue.

The legacy of the murders also lives on in Arizona police agencies, where detectives interrogating suspects strive not to make the mistakes sheriff's investigators made 20 years ago. [That is rubbish!!! The "9 Step Reid Method" is still routinely used by most police departments in the USA to get confessions. Hell, for that matter the "9 Step Reid Method" is routinely used by police departments through out the world to get confessions.]

Early on, detectives threatened, pressured and coerced four innocent men into false confessions, then used the same tactics with two other suspects. [Sure sounds like they used the "9 Step Reid Method" to get the confessions] The result: A guilty man who confessed and went to prison may yet go free.

The monks who live, pray and teach at Wat Promkunaram, meanwhile, will hold a prayer service Aug. 27 for the six Buddhist monks, a nun and two acolytes who were brutally murdered at the temple in the community of Waddell on that night 20 years ago.

A frenzied scene

Russell Kimball, then-homicide chief for the Sheriff's Office, remembers the frenzy at the crime scene.

"It was like an armed camp out there - everybody who was anybody in law enforcement wanted a part of it," he said. "The media was everywhere; it couldn't have been a higher-profile case."

Investigators found nine victims lying face down and grouped together, their heads pointing inward like spokes in a wheel. Some had their hands clasped in prayer. The carpet was bloody from head wounds made by .22-caliber bullets and shotgun blasts to torsos, arms and legs.

Sheriff's detectives over six days did exhaustive crime-scene work, taking thousands of photographs and fingerprints and making scores of diagrams.

"We collected every shell casing, took down walls and took the carpet out," Kimball said. "We also set up a multiagency task force. We soon had 221 people from 21 agencies on the case, and all done under constant pressure."

Despite an exhaustive investigation, weeks went by without a solid lead. Then, one month after the killings came what seemed like the big break. Tucson mental-hospital patient Mike McGraw, 24, on Sept. 10, 1991, called sheriff's investigators. He said he knew who had done it and he named names. [Wow!!! So a guy from a NUT HOUSE or INSANE ASYLUM in Tucson called and said he could help the cops solve the murders!!! And the dumb cops listened to him!!!!]

Soon, Tucson police had picked up McGraw and several friends: Leo Bruce, then 28, Mark Nunez, 19, Dante Parker, 20, and Victor Zarate, 28. All were taken to Phoenix and grilled from 9 p.m. to dawn daily, from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13. [Again the techniques used sound exactly like the "9 Step Reid Method"]

Kimball said the investigators pleaded, cajoled, threatened and lied. [Again that's how the "9 Step Reid Method" works]

"It was so frenetic, 'You do this and I do that,' and we used tag-team tactics," he said. "Worse, we had people who'd never done murder interrogations, or even major crimes, before working those guys." [Rubbish. This those are the standard operating techniques used by police to get confessions - the "9 Step Reid Method"]

Among the mistakes made by interrogators, Kimball said, was, "they fed information about the case to them, and a trained homicide investigator would not do that." [Again those were not mistakes, but the standard operating procedure of using "9 Step Reid Method" to get confessions]

The suspects' resistance only added pressure.

"We hammered on those guys until we broke their will, it was as simple and bad as that," he said. "After a while they were willing to say anything." [And this is how the "9 Step Reid Method" works. You beat the krap out of them with a psychological rubber hose until they confess]

The defendants buckle

Beaten down and exhausted, four of the defendants began to tell the detectives what they believed they wanted to hear, and because they'd been given information about the murders, they gave details that seemed damning.

"Obviously they talked - because of the pressure," Kimball said. "A suspect has been up for hours and everything starts breaking down. The suspect gets to a place where they just submit, say anything the detectives want, just to stop the pressure." [And that is how the "9 Step Reid Method" is supposed to work. The "9 Step Reid Method" is very effective at getting confessions. Both real confessions and false confessions]

One man didn't break. Zarate maintained his innocence and was released.

Then-County Attorney Rick Romley charged McGraw, Bruce, Parker and Nunez with nine counts each of first-degree murder.

But once the "Tucson Four" had a few days to rest and think about what had happened to them, they recanted, saying they were coerced. But investigators were certain the crime was solved. [Days? The reporter exaggerating. It only took a few hours for the Tucson kids to recant their confessions. They made the cops happy by confessing and now wanted to go home, like the cops promised them they could if they confessed.]

Then, on Oct. 23, they got a fateful phone call.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab had identified the murder weapon: a .22-caliber rifle that didn't belong to any of the Tucson men. It belonged to a boy named Rolando Caratachea Jr., then 16.

The rifle had been found Aug. 21 when Caratachea and his friend, Johnathan Doody, 17, were stopped by Luke Air Force Base police. Task-force investigators had learned about the stop, picked up the rifle on Sept. 10 and talked with Doody, who said that he and friend Alessandro Garcia, 16, had fired it several times together. All three young men lived in the West Valley.

But that line of investigation stopped, because Sept. 10 was the day Mike McGraw made his call from Tucson. The rifle sat in a detective's office for weeks before being tested.

A new theory

Once investigators learned it was one of the murder weapons, Caratachea, Doody and Garcia were picked up for questioning. They were put in adjoining interrogation rooms. Detectives went to work on them, sure they were part of a murder crew involving the Tucson men. [Again using the good old "9 Step Reid Method"]

Valley lawyer and author Gary L. Stuart, who long has been absorbed by the case, said that when he began to write about it he planned to concentrate on how improper interrogation techniques can elicit false confessions. [Improper? Improper or not the "9 Step Reid Method" is the technique used by departments throughout the world because it is effective at getting confessions - both false confessions and real confessions]

"In my first two years of research that's what I focused on," he said. "Then I realized the story was at least as much about coercing true confessions as coercing false confessions."

Stuart points out in his 2010 book "Innocent Until Interrogated" that "when the detectives who had questioned the Tucson Four got their hands on Doody, Caratachea and Garcia, they used their old playbook."

Garcia succumbed to interrogators, who told him he could escape execution if he gave them Doody. Garcia admitted being at the temple that night and said Doody shot the monks with the .22, while he blasted them with a shotgun.

The heat was turned up on Doody.

"Doody was subjected to intense interrogation by the same group of officers, using the same techniques that they had earlier successfully used to break down the Tucson Four," Stuart said. [Again the good old "9 Step Reid Method"]

"Doody was arrested at 9:30 p.m. on a Friday night, put in a holding cell until midnight and then they started the interrogation," Stuart said. "It went all night, and by 6 a.m. the next morning he is starting to be incoherent - you can hear it on the tape. He is crying and petrified, he has two adults playing the 'good cop, bad cop' routine. He was in there almost 13 hours." Different suspect, same tactics [Again that sure sound like it came from the playbook of the "9 Step Reid Method"]

Kimball says now, "It was the same old thing."

"You have (the interrogating detective) begging Johnathan to tell you the truth, and you could feel him not wanting to surrender," Kimball said. "But he finally did surrender; was broken."

Doody admitted he'd gone to the temple that night with Garcia. He didn't admit to shooting anyone. Still, what he said was enough to eventually convict him - and to convince Romley that the Tucson Four case "was just all wrong."

"I had questions about the Tucson men even before Doody and Garcia's interrogations," Romley said. [if you had questions why did you let them rot in jail for a year *sshole???] "I began to review the materials, and inconsistencies started popping up. It just didn't hold together. I talked to Tom Agnos and said I was dismissing the charges against the Tucson Four. It was a difficult conversation."

The Tucson Four were released Nov. 22, 1991. All but McGraw sued the county. In 1994, Leo Bruce and Mark Nunez got $1.1 million each. Dante Parker got $240,000.

Doody and Garcia were tried in 1993. Doody did not testify. His statement that he was at the temple the night of the killings, and Garcia's testimony that he and Doody carried out the killings, were enough to convict them of nine counts of first-degree murder.

On Feb. 11, 1994, Doody was sentenced to 281 years in prison. On July 15, 1994, Garcia got 271 years. For Garcia, who had readily confessed, appeals of the sentence seemed useless.

Not so for Doody.

The case had drawn national attention. Doody's treatment at the hands of interrogators brought Alan Dershowitz, a nationally known attorney, to his side.

In 1995, Dershowitz, working with lawyer Peter Balkan in Phoenix, argued to the Arizona Court of Appeals that Doody was wrongfully deprived of his father's presence during the interrogation. He also argued that the Miranda warning against self-incrimination was improperly administered and that Doody's confession was not voluntary.

There began the appeals that continue to this day, though now near resolution.

Legal challenges ongoing

In May, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Doody's confession, elicited over 12 hours of questioning, was illegally coerced. On Aug. 1, the Arizona Attorney General's Office petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse that decision. If the Supreme Court refuses, Doody must be retried or go free.

Stuart said Doody's confession never should have stood up in court.

"What the law requires is a standard of admissibility and evidence for a confession, and the test of admissibility is whether it was freely and voluntarily given by the defendant," Stuart said. "The standard is whether the defendant's will was overborne by the interrogator. Was he coerced into confessing?

"They coerced the Tucson Four, who were innocent, but in much the same way they coerced Doody, who is guilty," Stuart said. "It was coercion all the same, and that should make it inadmissible in court."

Stuart said the appellate ruling clarified "that the danger to society and constitutional mandates are every bit as important in true confessions as they are in false confessions."

If there is a broader legal legacy of the investigation, it is this: Detectives at Valley police agencies are now more mindful of their interrogation techniques.

Interestingly, the murders are not at all a searing topic at the temple where they all took place.

The day after the slayings, Buddhist monk Phrakru Widesbrommakun was called to Phoenix from a Los Angeles temple. He has been in Waddell ever since, now serving as abbot.

"I knew the people who were killed, and we still feel very sad here about it, of course," the monk said recently as he sat in the temple's dining hall. "But we do not have hatred about it. In that respect, we have forgotten what happened and cannot concern ourselves with it.

"We are about peace."

Two Powerful Signals of a Major Shift on Crime

Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates.

Source

Two Powerful Signals of a Major Shift on Crime

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ERICA GOODE

Published: August 12, 2013

WASHINGTON — Two decisions Monday, one by a federal judge in New York and the other by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., were powerful signals that the pendulum has swung away from the tough-on-crime policies of a generation ago.

Critics have long contended that draconian mandatory minimum sentence laws for low-level drug offenses, as well as stop-and-frisk police policies that target higher-crime and minority neighborhoods, have a disproportionate impact on members of minority groups. On Monday, Mr. Holder announced that federal prosecutors would no longer invoke the sentencing laws, and a judge found that stop-and-frisk practices in New York were unconstitutional racial profiling.

While the timing was a coincidence, Barbara Arnwine, the president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that the effect was “historic, groundbreaking, and potentially game-changing.”

“I thought that the most important significance of both events was the sense of enough is enough,” said Ms. Arnwine, who attended the speech in San Francisco where Mr. Holder unveiled the new Justice Department policy. “It’s a feeling that this is the moment to make needed change. This just can’t continue, this level of extreme heightened injustice in our policing, our law enforcement and our criminal justice system.”

A generation ago, amid a crack epidemic, state and federal lawmakers enacted a wave of tough-on-crime measures that resulted in an 800 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the United States, even as the population grew by only a third. The spike in prisoners centered on an increase in the number of African-American and Hispanic men convicted of drug crimes; blacks are about six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated.

But the crack wave has long since passed and violent crime rates have plummeted to four-decade lows, in the process reducing crime as a salient political issue. Traditionally conservative states, driven by a need to save money on building and maintaining prisons, have taken the lead in scaling back policies of mass incarceration. Against that backdrop, the move away from mandatory sentences and Judge Shira A. Scheindlin’s ruling on stop-and-frisk practices signaled that a course correction on two big criminal justice issues that disproportionately affect minorities has finally been made, according to the advocates who have pushed for those changes.

“I think that there is a sea change now of thinking around the impact of over-incarceration and selective enforcement in our criminal justice system on racial minorities,” said Vanita Gupta of the American Civil Liberties Union. “These are hugely significant and symbolic events, because we would not have either of these even five years ago.”

Michelle Alexander, an Ohio State University law professor who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” an influential 2010 book about the racial impact of policies like stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimum drug sentences, said the two developments gave her a sense of “cautious optimism.”

“For those of us who have become increasingly alarmed over the years at the millions of lives that have been wasted due to the drug war and the types of police tactics that have been deployed in the get-tough-on-crime movement, today’s announcements give us fresh hope that there is, in fact, a growing public consensus that the path that we, the nation, have been on for the past 40 years has been deeply misguided and has caused far more harm and suffering than it has prevented,” she said.

But not everyone was celebrating. William G. Otis, a former federal prosecutor and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, described Mr. Holder’s move as a victory for drug dealers that would incentivize greater sales of addictive contraband, and he suggested that the stop-and-frisk ruling could be overturned on appeal.

Mr. Otis also warned that society was becoming “complacent” and forgetting that the drug and sentencing policies enacted over the last three decades had contributed to the falling crime rates.

Yet Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based research group, said many police chiefs agreed that it was time to rethink mandatory sentencing for low-level drug offenses. And he said departments across the country would examine the stop-and-frisk ruling in New York “to see if their practices pass muster.”

But he added: “You can’t get away from the fact that in most large cities, crime is concentrated in poor areas which are predominantly minority. The question becomes, what tactics are acceptable in those communities to reduce crime? And there is a trade-off between the tactics that may be used and the issue of fairness.”

David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia who has been involved in a lawsuit over stop-and-frisk in that city, said both Holder’s announcement and the ruling were “part of a national re-examination of criminal justice policy that has been spurred for the last 40 years by a fear of crime.”

As that fear has lessened, he added, there has been more room to be heard for critics who say that some policies have gone too far and may be counterproductive. Those critics cite the low rate of finding guns with stop-and-frisk actions, and say that the experience of being searched — and the consequences if drugs are discovered — alienate people in targeted communities, making them less willing to give the police information about more serious violent crimes.

“There was the thought that if we stop, frisk, arrest and incarcerate huge numbers of people, that will reduce crime,” Rudovsky said. “But while that may have had some effect on crime, the negative parts outweighed the positive parts.”

Critics have argued that aggressive policing in minority neighborhoods can distort overall crime statistics. Federal data show, for example, that black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates.

“There is just as much drugs going on in the Upper East Side of New York or Cleveland Park in D.C.,” said Jamie Fellner, a specialist on race and criminal drug law enforcement for Human Rights Watch, citing predominantly affluent and white neighborhoods. “But that is not where police are doing their searches for drugs.”

Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has studied race and incarceration issues, said Mr. Holder’s speech and Judge Scheindlin’s stop-and-frisk ruling both addressed policies that “were attempts to stop crime, but they weren’t terribly effective.”

Together, he said, the events indicated that society was “trying to become more effective and more targeted and, in the process, to reduce the heavy impact on particularly African-Americans.”

Most people are in prison for victimless drug war crimes

After victimless drug war crimes most people are in prison for weapons violations

Victimless drug and gun crimes are why most people are in Federal prisons.

51 percent of federal prison inmates are there for victimless drug war crimes. In the above graph the second highest number of people are in federal prisons for weapons violations. The article didn't give a percent for weapons violations.

Source

Eric Holder is cutting federal drug sentences. That will make a small dent in the U.S. prison population.

By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 12 at 2:50 pm

Populations at federal prisons have grown, but state prisons are the real problem.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”

He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.

Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.

Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.

There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.

The states are different

But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.

In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.

Bjs state breakdown

Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.

Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.

It’s not hopeless

Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.

There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.

¿Como se dice Nazi en Español? ¡¡¡John Kerry!!!

EU recaba información para garantizar seguridad: Kerry

El secretario de Estado estadounidense justificó los programas de espionaje de su país y reiteró que éstos se realizan dentro del marco jurídico.

El secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos, John Kerry, respondió a las quejas brasileñas sobre el espionaje global y dijo que su país seguirá haciendo "lo necesario" para preservar la "seguridad" de los estadounidenses y "del mundo en general".

En una rueda de prensa junto al canciller brasileño, Antonio Patriota, quien reiteró el malestar que causaron en su país las denuncias del espionaje estadounidense, Kerry aseguró que Washington hará "lo necesario para que esos problemas no interfieran en las relaciones" y sostuvo que EU actúa "dentro de las leyes".

Kerry explicó que no podría "discutir cuestiones operacionales" relativas a la "seguridad nacional" en una rueda de prensa, pero aseguró que todas las actividades de las agencias estadounidenses se dan en los marcos de leyes aprobadas "por el Congreso nacional después de los ataques del 11 de septiembre" de 2001.

Según Kerry, "Estados Unidos recoge información de inteligencia para proteger a sus ciudadanos, como hacen todas las naciones del mundo, y lo hace dentro de las leyes".

Explicó que, en el caso de Brasil, "se seguirá dialogando para que haya certezas y el gobierno entienda y esté de acuerdo" con lo que Estados Unidos "debe hacer para garantizar su seguridad y la seguridad del mundo en general".

Subrayó además que, "en los últimos años, un cierto número de grupos (terroristas) han atentado contra los intereses no sólo de Estados Unidos, sino también de otros países", y que el gobierno de Barack Obama "sólo está intentando evitar que esas cosas ocurran".

Según Kerry, Brasil y Estados Unidos deben seguir "trabajando juntos" y "concentrarse" en las "realidades más importantes de las relaciones bilaterales". Entre ellas citó la promoción de "los valores democráticos", el "empeño por mejorar la vida de nuestras sociedades", el fomento del comercio y las relaciones económicas o la cooperación en áreas como ciencia y tecnología.

40 years in prison for a pound of meth

Source

Phoenix-based drug-trafficking leader sentenced to 40 years

Associated Press Wed Aug 14, 2013 2:19 PM

PHOENIX — The Mexican national who was a leader of a drug-trafficking ring that operated in the Phoenix area has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Artemio Pena-Torrecillas of Sinaloa was sentenced earlier this week. He was found guilty in May of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine, conspiracy to commit money laundering and other charges.

Federal prosecutors say Pena-Torrecillas and Cruz Ortega-Ruano led the Phoenix-based ring. They were accused of trafficking exceptionally pure methamphetamine.

Prosecutors say Pena-Torrecillas was responsible for obtaining the meth, hiring drug couriers to drive vehicles equipped with sophisticated hidden compartments to transport the drugs and distributing the drugs to customers.

Ortega-Ruano and others charged in the case pleaded guilty and have been sentenced.

Throwing money at the border solves nothing

Source

Throwing money at the border solves nothing

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com

Wed Aug 14, 2013 3:11 PM

Ajo has its own personal housing bubble, courtesy of a rich uncle from back east.

Uncle Sam spent an average of $600,000 apiece for 21 houses for U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel. The average non-federally funded house in Ajo sold for less than $100,000 last year.

You could label this lavish spending. You could use words that are unprintable. The outrage bounces between this being another example of standard government waste and it being an extraordinary display of bureaucrats who’ve lost all contact with reality.

But it would be a mistake to miss the larger point.

This happened in an atmosphere of all-around lavish spending on border security, spending that the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t measured for effectiveness.

Over the past five years, the feds have spent more than $106 billion to secure and militarize the Southwest border. We have no idea if this contributed to a reduction in the number of illegal border crossers, or if reduced demand for labor during the recession should get more credit.

The Border Patrol more than doubled in size since 2004 as the nation pursued an enforcement-only approach to illegal immigration.

A nice bureaucratic explanation for the federally funded Ajo housing boom is that all those new agents created an unmet demand for homes. But according to reporting by The Arizona Republic’s Brenna Goth, nearly 30 percent of Ajo’s houses were vacant between 2007 and 2011.

Customs and Border Protection didn’t want fixer-uppers or old-style stuff. So it built new. At great taxpayer expense.

It’s worth asking whether it is possible to apply real oversight and tough scrutiny to this big-spending agency of federal government. The rally cry from Congress for years has been “secure the border.”

In the process, if a million gets wasted here or there? Oh, well.

The Senate’s comprehensive immigration-reform bill includes a $43 billion “border surge” of spending and, once again, doubling the size of the Border Patrol.

In June, Art Del Cueto of the Border Patrol Union’s Tucson Local 2544 expressed concerns about this proposed surge in the number of agents.

“They need to take care of the agents that are here now,” he told Republic reporter Bob Ortega.

“We haven’t had a uniform allowance for two years. We have agents doubled up in vehicles to save fuel. We have to qualify with our firearms every quarter, and they don’t even give us ammo to practice anymore. ... How are you going to clothe and provide gas and vehicles for 20,000 more?”

But some of them have swell houses.

If the feds double the size of the Border Patrol again, can the $1.2 million house in Ajo be far behind?

One lesson — if anyone at the DHS is learning from past mistakes — is that the more you bloat an agency, the closer you need to watch how it spends the people’s money.

Another lesson: Just throwing money at border security isn’t enough. The strategies need to be proven and effective, not just expensive.

Blockwatch grants - A big waste of money!!!!

Blockwatch grants - a government welfare program for cops???

Source

Phoenix Block Watch allocations draw questions

Youth programs get portion of crime-prevention money

by Connie Cone Sexton - Aug. 8, 2012 11:01 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Since 2008, more than $1.5 million of taxpayer money for Phoenix neighborhood crime prevention that could have been awarded to traditional Block Watch programs was given to programs designed to steer youths from crime, even though some question whether the latter is effective.

An Arizona Republic analysis of the past five years of Phoenix Neighborhood Block Watch grant awards found that more than one in five grants benefited youth programs, including Wake Up Clubs, sports or academic programs.

The money was used to take children to Lake Pleasant, the Arizona Science Center, Kartchner Caverns and other destinations as a reward for participating in a Phoenix police-led after-school program and for completing community-service projects.

Meanwhile, at least 15 traditional Block Watch grant applicants initially received no funding this year from the annual pool of $1.2 million, despite requests for items such as security lighting and cameras to catch graffiti vandals. However, at least three of those groups were later granted at least partial funding on appeal. The Phoenix City Council is expected to vote on final allocations in the next few weeks.

Crime-prevention specialists, while acknowledging the benefits of teaching children values like respect for police officers and community service, question whether the emphasis -- to deter children from a life of crime -- is effective. [So one of the things these Blockwatch grants do is brainwash the kiddies into worshiping cops! I bet Hitler and Stalin's Blockwatch grants did the same thing]

Voters created the Phoenix Neighborhood Block Watch Grant Program with Proposition 301, a sales-tax increase passed in 1993. Today, those who oversee it are divided over the best way to fight crime. For some, it's getting neighbors to monitor their streets, installing security lighting or Block Watch signs, using walkie-talkies for neighborhood patrols and holding community events to promote crime prevention. For others, it means continuing to invest in programs for youth.

Since 2008, more than $36,000 paid for youth sports at Granada East School in central Phoenix. In May, the City Council approved $7,600 for 2012-13 to pay coaches, referees, league fees and transportation for boys and girls to participate in basketball, soccer, baseball and softball. [Sounds like the money we were told was going to prevent crime is used for sports programs.]

In 2011, the Wilson Coalition neighborhood in southeast Phoenix received $9,800 to pay for after-school playground, library and gym supervisors for students at Wilson Elementary School.

Phoenix officials said there is anecdotal evidence that youth programs curb crime but could not provide research to back that up. [Translation - trust us, we know what we are doing even if it doesn't look like it.] Some members of the city Block Watch Oversight Committee question the investment.

"They sound like good programs, but do they really prevent crime? An argument can be made that it's not," said John Schroeder, a member of the City Council-appointed Block Watch Oversight Committee, which reviews grant applications and makes recommendations.

Every year, neighborhood groups in Phoenix may apply for up to $10,000 for a crime-prevention project. The Phoenix Police Department, which administers the Block Watch program, presents the committee's recommendations to the City Council. The newest round of grants were approved in May without discussion.

For the fiscal year that began July 1, about $224,000 has been designated for 24 Wake Up Clubs. That's 18.6 percent of total funding.

Of the 211 applications, 25 groups were initially unfunded. Among the rejections: Tatum Park Neighborhood Block Watch in northeast Phoenix, which requested $6,100 for projects that included solar lights for security; and Discovery at Villa de Paz in southwest Phoenix, which sought $9,800 for a flashlight camera to catch vandals. Funding questioned

Most of the youth money has supported about two dozen Wake Up Clubs.

The programs are held one hour a week after school and for about five weeks during the summer. Phoenix police officers serve as class leaders -- some making $60 or more an hour -- working with children on community-improvement projects or homework. [So the Blockwatch grants are also a jobs program for cops - some who are getting paid $60/hr which is about $120,000 a year]

During the past four years, each club was given $3,000 to $5,000 to pay for police officers to operate an individual program. Another $3,000 to $5,000 was awarded to fund admission and transportation costs to various attractions or to travel to community-service projects. The field trips, sometimes done in summer, are for children who participate in Wake Up Club meetings during the school year.

Phoenix police Officer Robin Ontiveros, who oversees the Wake Up Clubs, said she has seen the difference they make in the lives of children. "It's very effective because it's run by the Police Department. It's like a mentoring program." [Translation - I'm getting paid $60 and hour to brainwash kids into loving cops. I love my high paying do nothing job as a police officer]

Wake Up Clubs were started in 1995 by the department's Community Effort to Abate Street Crime, after a drive-by shooting of a 4-year-old in south Phoenix spurred residents to ask for help.

Critics say funding for Wake Up Clubs may benefit the community in the long run but hurt groups seeking money for crime-fighting programs. Schroeder questions the money going to youth programs and wants to see research and statistics on their impact.

The first year northeast Phoenix resident Jerry Cline was on the Block Watch Oversight Committee, he noticed all Wake Up Club applications were identical, seeking the same amounts of money to take kids to the same places. By the second year, he started asking questions. This year, he said there were a lot of "conversations" about whether the clubs should continue to be funded through Block Watch.

"When you get close to running out of money, you start thinking whether you should use the money to fund other projects," Cline said.

This year, for the first time since 2010, most Wake Up Club requests were not fully funded. Still, the oversight committee didn't make drastic cuts, except in the case of one school, Simpson Elementary, which last year sent kids on 30 field trips with Block Watch funds.

For fiscal 2012-13, Simpson's Wake Up Club was given $6,198 of their $10,000 request. Most clubs saw their $8,900 to $10,000 requests trimmed by only $100 or $200.

'Faith' and fairness

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said he believes children's programs "pay long-term dividends" and said he takes the oversight committee's recommendations on "faith" that it knows what's best for the community. [Translation - Trust your government masters, we know what we are doing. Even if we don't have an facts to verify that we are producing results]

Judy Welch, captain of the Villa de Paz Block Watch, near Camelback Road and 102nd Avenue, disagrees. She said her group's request for a flashlight camera to catch graffiti violators was denied. She doesn't think it's right that funding instead went to Wake Up Clubs.

"What do they have to do with crime prevention?" she asked. "Block Watch money is about graffiti and vandalism. ... You'd have to have a lot of research into following these kids for years to find out if it helped."

Abby Dunton, coordinator for the Farmington Park Block Watch near 91st Avenue and Lower Buckeye Road, said her group was denied $10,000 for an audio, solar-powered, bilingual flashing-beacon system to help pedestrians at a busy crosswalk. During an appeal to the oversight committee last week, her project was approved.

For Cline, of the oversight committee, the question about Wake Up Clubs remains, "How does it deter crime?"

Early intervention

Crime prevention takes many forms, including Wake Up Clubs, said Phoenix police Officer Deb Iodice, the Block Watch Program coordinator. Officers talk to the kids about things like bullying and drugs. [More of those $60/hr jobs for cops to brainwash the kiddies????]

"You can see the wheels in their head turning," Iodice said. [Yea, and you can also see the dollars signs dancing around in the head of Phoenix police Officer Deb Iodice]

Iodice acknowledges that the city can't quantify how many crimes are prevented this way. "There's no great way to track it. I think that's a disservice, but we're here to educate people," Iodice said. [Yea, I think it great that I am getting paid $60 and hour for a job where I don't have to document that I am producing results]

She understands the criticism of using crime-prevention money for an after-school program. "Sometimes the program kind of gets a negative vibe because it costs a lot of money, but I think it's a fantastic program," Iodice said. [Yea, and she isn't even going to address the question of does it make sense to pay cops $60 and hour for programs that don't do anything other then fatten the wallets of the cops that give them.]

Daniel Morales, a prevention coordinator at Touchstone Behavioral Health, a non-profit organization that works to help young people lead productive lives, said getting kids to feel better about themselves can help keep them from underage drinking, drug use and getting into trouble. [Wile it is a non-profit organization, I bet Daniel Morales is getting paid big bucks for his part in the program. Just like the cops are]

Miguel "Mickey" Villarreal, 14, said he took his Wake Up Club experience in middle school seriously. "It helped me open up and be more accepting of others. And they teach you the consequences of drugs and getting into trouble. I've seen my older brother grow up and make the wrong decisions." [Translation - the police brainwashing worked on Miguel "Mickey" Villarreal]

Villarreal, now a freshman at Trevor Browne High School in west Phoenix, returned this summer to volunteer with a Wake Up Club.

Republic reporters Ofelia Madrid, Matt Dempsey and Samantha Bush contributed to this article.

Fixing New York’s flawed ‘stop and frisk’ policing

That's bullsh*t. According to this article NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg police thugs have violated the rights of 4.4 million Mexicans and Blacks over the last 8 years by falsely arresting them (i.e. detaining them) and illegally searching them for guns and drugs.

The false arrests and illegal searches are bad enough, but for all practical purposes the Second Amendment has also been flushed down the toilet in New York City too and those people are not allowed to have guns to protect themselves from either government criminals or common criminals.

Source

Fixing New York’s flawed ‘stop and frisk’ policing

By Editorial Board, Published: August 14

IN AN emphatic defense of civil liberties, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin on Monday declared that significant portions of New York City’s controversial “stop and frisk” policing tactic — at least as it’s been employed throughout the Bloomberg administration — were unconstitutional.

While the policy accompanied a steep decline in the homicide rate in recent years, the unfortunate reality is that the city’s use of stop and frisk has come to represent the largest racial profiling operation in the United States, with African Americans and Hispanics accounting for more than 80 percent of the 4.4 million stops conducted over eight years. That has undermined the trust residents place in law enforcement, especially in minority communities.

Both reasonable and practical, Judge Scheindlin’s195-page ruling ultimately afforded civil rights the primacy they deserve. “The goals of liberty and safety may be in tension,” she wrote, “but they can coexist — indeed the Constitution mandates it.”

Despite the firestorm the ruling in Floyd v. City of New York has already ignited in City Hall — where, within hours of the decision, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, true to form, vowed to appeal— the judge didn’t outlaw New York’s use of stop and frisk, a tool the Supreme Court has supported. She merely found that the New York Police Department (NYPD), in its particular application of the practice, had violated both the plaintiffs’ Fourth and 14th Amendment rights — the first guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the second guarantees equal protection under the law to every person, regardless of race.

As a corrective measure, the judge ordered an “immediate” change to the policy and the appointment of an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk. These requirements are similar to measures the New York City Council passed this summer that were met with a veto from Mr. Bloomberg. If the judge’s ruling holds, oversight and accountability for stop and frisk finally would become the law.

Perhaps the most valuable piece of the opinion, however, was its condemnation of what the judge called City’s Hall’s “deliberate indifference” to the racial disparity in law enforcement techniques. “In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective,” the judge wrote of New York’s leaders, presumably Mr. Bloomberg and Raymond W. Kelly, his police chief, “they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right people’ is racially discriminatory.”

Less than a month after George Zimmerman was acquitted on charges of manslaughter and second-degree murder for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, and after President Obama’s moving response in the days that followed, those words have a special resonance.

Government surveillance spurs Americans to fight back

Government surveillance spurs Americans to fight back

By Dana Priest, Published: August 14 E-mail the writer

At the Pentagon and CIA, they are known as “countermeasures,” the jargony adaptation of Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The U.S. Army in Iraq jammed cellphones to counter deadly roadside bombs triggered by calls.

Osama bin Laden switched to carrier pigeons when spy agencies got good at eavesdropping on al-Qaeda communications.

And Adam Harvey revved up his assembly line to foil — or at least critique — the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records in the name of counterterrorism.

Harvey is an artist and privacy advocate in New York. His “privacy protection” creations, which include “anti-drone garments” that he says thwart thermal imaging cameras, have attracted the attention of guerrilla fashionistas and at least one intelligence agency. (He won’t say which one or share the e-mail the agency sent him because he’s so concerned about it.)

His latest gadget, to be sent to customers Sept. 20, is a metallized fabric case that he says shields a cellphone from electronic poaching by the government, by phone companies, by whomever.

“The thing I’m worried about is creating a large database of all my movements and not knowing what it’s used for,” said Harvey, 32, who has been in the habit of turning his phone off and taking out the battery to counter companies he believes already know too much about him. [If the phone has a large capacitor in it, the phone will continue to operate for some time even if the battery is removed]

“When you give up your privacy, it can make anyone vulnerable to ma­nipu­la­tion,” he said.

A tradition of resistance

Harvey’s creations are the latest in a typically American cultural reaction to perceived or real government intrusiveness that is as old as government surveillance of citizens.

“It reflects a growing cultural influence and critique about the scope of government activity,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, said of Harvey’s work. “Everybody carries some degree of paranoia. And maybe he’s not the only one who should be worried. Maybe it’s anyone who has an e-mail, cellphone or Zip code.”

In 2006, Rotenberg’s organization and its supporters protested a new U.S. electronic passport whose embedded microchip can be read from a distance. They handed out “personal passport protectors” — plastic bags and aluminum foil to wrap the passport and make the chip unreadable. Afterward, the government tweaked the technology to make the passport harder to read by unauthorized persons.

When the Transportation Security Administration adopted body scanners at airports, activists wrote the Fourth Amendment on their underwear in metallic paint readable by the new devices.

The U.S. government’s ever-expanding use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), some armed with Hellfire missiles, has provoked a mini-industry of cultural countermeasures, local government regulations and splashy, nonlethal uses.

In San Francisco, a drone delivered an engagement ring to a wedding proposal. In Philadelphia, a dry cleaner used the aircraft to carry clean shirts to customers. In Stockholm, an artist designed a clown-faced “peace drone” that dispenses the painkiller oxycodone.

A growing concern about drones in U.S. airspace has prompted legal countermeasures. In the small Colorado town of Deer Trail, the town board recently split 3 to 3 on an ordinance that would have approved drone-hunting licenses and bounties for shooting them. Residents will vote on the measure in November.

It began with one man’s campaign. “We don’t want drones in town,” Phillip Steel told Denver TV station ABC7. “They fly in town, they get shot down.”

The Federal Aviation Administration reacted with a warning about the injury risks of shooting objects out of the sky.

An Oklahoma state representative wants to limit police access to surveillance drones to certain situations, such as finding a missing child.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a nemesis of drone surveillance and critic of domestic surveillance in general, managed to get the FBI to tell him it had used surveillance drones in eight criminal cases and two national security cases.

“None of the UAVs used by the FBI are armed with either lethal or non-lethal weapons, and the FBI has no plans to use weapons with UAVs,” an FBI letter to Paul stated last month. “The FBI does not use UAVs to conduct ‘bulk’ surveillance or to conduct general surveillance not related to an investigation or assessment.”

Every drone operation is done by the book, with the proper approvals, the letter said.

To protect and provoke

Harvey’s inspiration for his first privacy project, a kind of facial camouflage, did not originate with something as serious as the possibility of drone warfare. It was inspired by club parties. It bothered him that someone could easily take pictures of people in their most unguarded moments and post the photos online, without permission, perhaps never to be erased.

Developed as his master’s thesis at New York University, CV Dazzle, named after a type of ship camo used during World War II, is face paint designed to make features undetectable by computer vision algorithms, which are used in computerized facial recognition.

From there he moved into a line of “anti-drone” garments made of a metallized fabric that traps body heat. It is meant to cloak heat signatures from the prying eyes of thermal imaging devices sometimes mounted on drones and police surveillance aircraft. To be provocative, the clothes come in only three styles: a burqa, a hijab and a hoodie.

His customer base for the few he has sold so far has been “niche and fashion,” Harvey said. He said he does not intend to sell his stealthwear to anyone with nefarious motives: “I’m mostly interested in the conversations it generates.”

The NSA declined to comment on Harvey’s work, as did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Dickie Richards, who retired from the NSA after 41 years of service, said the garments and phone case could be “somewhat effective” but that bending the material could easily create gaps through which electronic signals or heat could escape. “It’s much better than wearing an aluminum cap, though,” he laughed.

If the government targets someone, he added, such countermeasures would be useless against the many tools officials could bring to bear. “It could be effective if they’re a target of convenience,” he acknowledged.

Harvey’s latest invention, the phone case, was almost ready for mass production when Edward Snowden released his trove of classified NSA documents and the world learned just how much phone and e-mail traffic the spy agency was vacuuming up every day. Taking advantage of the news, Harvey rushed to begin an online Kickstarter fundraising campaign ahead of schedule.

The Kickstarter campaign went active Aug. 2 with a goal of $35,000, which would allow Harvey and his colleague, Johanna Bloomfield, to produce and market the product in larger quantities. Halfway through the campaign, they have raised more than $44,000.

Lawsuit challenges CHA's drug testing policy

But I am also against the government flushing the constitution down the toilet and making people pee in a bottle to prove they don't take illegal drugs to get into these programs.

Source

Lawsuit challenges CHA's drug testing policy

By Kim Geiger Tribune reporter

10:04 a.m. CDT, August 15, 2013

A Chicago man who objects to having to submit to drug testing as a condition of living in an apartment that he rents from the Chicago Housing Authority filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the policy in federal court.

Joseph Peery, 58, has lived in the Parkside of Old Town mixed-income housing development on the Near North Side since 2010. Drug tests are required of all renters before they move into the complex and every year on renewal of a rental agreement, Peery said.

“It’s humiliating, embarrassing, stigmatizing, and it’s unfair,” Peery said in an interview. “I think it needs to end.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois took up Peery’s case and filed a class action lawsuit against the CHA.

The suit alleges that the drug testing, which is required at a number of the CHA’s mixed-income developments, violates tenants’ protections from unreasonable searches, seizures and invasions of privacy under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and under the Illinois Constitution.

Mixed-income developments are privately owned and operated housing complexes in which public housing tenants live alongside tenants who pay affordable rates and those who pay market rates. The CHA owns the land and provides subsidies to the developments’ public housing units, CHA spokesman Matt Aguilar said in a statement.

The agency also reviews the management company’s tenant selection criteria “and ensures that all rules for CHA residents are the same as those for market rate renters,” he said.

The CHA defends the Parkside policy, saying that it is applied equally to all renters at the complex, including those whose rent is not subsidized.

“One of the requirements of renters is that they follow property rules. And if those rules happen to include drug testing, then public housing families — like their market-rate and affordable renter neighbors — must adhere to those rules,” Aguilar said.

The CHA in 2011 considered requiring drug tests of all CHA tenants, but the board of directors killed the proposal. Then-board chairman James Reynolds said at the time that the board thought the proposal was “kind of close to violating on civil rights.”

Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the ACLU of Illinois, said the Parkside policy and those at other mixed-income developments are clearly aimed at CHA renters.

“The reason they’re doing this is because of the stigma of the CHA renters,” he said. “If they weren’t trying to get the CHA renters, they wouldn’t be doing it to any renters.”

Schwartz said that CHA acts as the “ultimate decider” on policies imposed by the housing manager.

“If the CHA does not want a criteria, the criteria doesn’t go in,” he said. “It takes CHA action to impose this policy.”

Peery’s rental agreement is with the CHA, not the private management company, according to Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois.

Brian Gilmore, a clinical associate professor and director of the housing clinic at Michigan State University College of Law, said he researched drug testing policies throughout the country in 2011 and was unable to find any other housing authority in the U.S. that allows the drug testing requirement.

“It looks like Chicago has probably gone the furthest of anyone,” Gilmore said.

Peery said he does not do drugs. He spent more than a decade working on projects aimed at helping people stay away from drugs, he said. He now works in the kitchen at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Peery described feeling humiliated by the testing process, which takes place at the office of the management company that oversees his apartment building.

“There’s secretaries there and people walking in and paying rent, and I’m handed a cup,” Peery said.

After producing the urine sample, “you’re literally sitting there with this cup on your lap with people walking in like why is this guy sitting there with a cup of urine on his lap?” Peery said. “I haven’t done a crime. Why am I made to feel like this?”

About a year after Peery moved into his one-bedroom apartment at Parkside, he heard that the CHA was considering appliying the drug test policy to all CHA tenants. He attended a town hall meeting where he said hundreds of people turned out to object to the idea.

“What really touched me was to watch a little old lady get up out of a wheelchair, right, to come to the mic to be able to speak, right, and shaking with — I mean, very vehement — ‘Why am I being forced to drug test and urinate into a cup?’” Peery recalled. “Why would you do that to a grandma?”

kgeiger@tribune.com

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

I remember we had an anti-war protest in Phoenix and the government used the same convoluted logic about a chalk drawing made on the sidewalk.

They also said the drawing would cost thousands of dollars to clean up, when in fact 5 minutes with a hose and water is all it would take to clean up the drawing.

Source

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

By FRANCIS MCCABE

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Four people could face up to a year in jail for chalking up city sidewalks while protesting police misconduct.

Kelly Wayne Patterson, 44, Brian Ballentine, 31, Hailee Jewell, 18, and Catalino de la Cruz Dazo Jr., 20, face multiple gross misdemeanor counts of placing graffiti or defacing property and conspiracy to commit placing graffiti.

If convicted, they could face probation, a suspended driver’s license, community service and up to a year in the Clark County Detention Center.

The four protesters, affiliated with Nevada Cop Block and Sunset Activist Collective, used washable colored chalk in July to write critical statements of police on the sidewalks outside the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters and in front of the Regional Justice Center.

Demonstrating against police brutality and officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, the protesters say they were practicing free speech and should not face charges.

District Attorney Steve Wolfson is taking the case seriously.

“This is not a kid drawing with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk. These are adults who used chalk to draw profanity,” he said. “And there is a law on the books that make it a crime to engage in this activity.”

One statement read: “Not one single cop in Metro’s entire history has been charged after shooting someone. Even if that person was unarmed and/or innocent.”

Another was: “(Expletive) the police.”

Officers on July 13 watched the protesters write statements on the sidewalk and told them they were violating anti-graffiti laws, according to police reports and court documents.

After the protest, Patterson and Ballentine were cited, and police called the city graffiti abatement team, which used high-powered washers to clean the dusty words.

Days later, before a scheduled court hearing on the citation the protesters again used colored chalk, typically made from a composite of calcium sulfate, as part of their protest outside the Regional Justice Center.

One statement read: “(Expletive) Pigs.”

An unknown woman dumped coffee on it, washing it away, according to police who witnessed the protest.

According to documents, Patterson then wrote on the coffee-stained ground, “(Expletive) the police.”

Police documented the evidence, called the city’s graffiti abatement team and began exhaustive research about the perils of power washing to sidewalks, including that it “artificially erodes and abrades the concrete’s surface thereby adding to the unnecessary wear and tear.”

Detailed police reports said the city crew cost $1,550 to clean both crime scenes.

The reports did not include the cost of the coffee used to clean one of the statements. It’s unclear whether it was a small, medium or large coffee.

Lawyer Robert Langford called the case preposterous and is representing the defendants pro bono.

“Under that standard, any kid that does hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk can be guilty of the same crime,” Langford said.

The veteran defense lawyer added, “Justice in this case is that the case should be dismissed. They were engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. Period. They have the right to engage in that type of protest. This was something that was harmless.”

Langford accused law enforcement officials of inflating the cost of the cleanup to justify the arrest and incarceration until bail was posted, instead of simply issuing a citation.

Part of his defense will be to show that the chalk could have been cleaned up at a lessor cost.

“My bet is a good stiff broom would have done the same thing,” he said.

By employing the power washing crew at a cost of more than $250, the graffiti charge was elevated from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, which could mean a stiffer sentence if they are convicted.

Langford said the amount of time, money and other taxpayer resources spent on the case is ridiculous. And all “because the bullies at the Las Vegas police department wanted to hurt people who wanted to criticize them. That’s, in the final analysis, what this case is about.”

Langford added he’s considering filing a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the defendants.

“Public property is being defaced with profanity,” Wolfson said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

A preliminary hearing is set for December.

Contact reporter Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039.

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