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more government lies about dead war heros that where killed by their own men

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0526wardead.html

Tillmans not alone fighting war secrecy

Pilot's dad in dark in friendly-fire death

David J. Cieslak

The Arizona Republic

May. 26, 2005 12:00 AM

Compared with the friendly-fire killing of Army Ranger and former Arizona Cardinal Pat Tillman, the death of Navy pilot Nathan White was relatively anonymous.

But after months of battling U.S. military officials to find out the real stories behind their sons' deaths, these two families have one common thought: They don't want other parents to have to fight for the truth like they have.

White's father remains plagued by a lengthy list of unanswered questions and non-stop stonewalling he says he received from the military for two years after his son was accidentally shot down over Iraq by an Army Patriot missile.

And although he is not powerful or famous, Dennis White is quietly using congressional representatives and the Internet to wage his own battle against military leaders and the secrecy surrounding his son's death.

"You broke our hearts and you took our son, but I can accept that," said White, who lives in Texas. "What we need to try to do is address those issues so the (military) addresses them and corrects them in the future. We don't need to have other parents dealing with what we did."

The Whites' private nightmare began much the same as the Tillmans' public struggle. Both families lost beloved young men in friendly-fire incidents, and both waited months to get answers.

Military officials say friendly-fire investigations can take a long time because of their complex nature. Investigators won't release information before the entire probe is completed because facts often change and individual details play a role in the larger story of the death.

Since 2003, Tillman and White are believed to be the only two military men with Arizona ties killed by friendly fire during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Across all military branches, White is one of nine known friendly-fire victims who died during the Iraq conflict.

During the Gulf War in 1991, there were about three dozen friendly-fire deaths, according to Pentagon officials. In Tillman's case, the popular athlete was sent to Afghanistan last year, where he and his unit were assigned to hunt for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Shortly after arriving, Tillman was killed in a hail of gunfire from his own men, who believed he was an enemy combatant.

The Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman's family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders. After a public memorial service, at which Tillman received the Silver Star, the Army told Tillman's family that he had been killed by his own men.

"The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting," Tillman's mother, Mary, told the Washington Post last week.

For Dennis White, it took some time before he came to terms with the reality that friendly fire killed his son. As a Vietnam veteran, White knew soldiers die in war and children don't always come home to their parents. But after Nathan was shot down during a mission southwest of Baghdad on April 2, 2003, his parents and wife, Akiko, say they were offered few details for more than 18 months.

Then, 10 days before Christmas last year, a briefing took place in which Nathan was partly blamed for the incident, Dennis said.

Despite showing that the missiles were erroneously tracking Nathan's jet as an unidentified aircraft, Dennis said investigators indicated Nathan was improperly prepared for the flight and believes high-ranking military officials managed to avoid accountability.

Dennis was furious. He wanted a reassessment. Unlike the Tillman family, he didn't have the media knocking on his door. Yet the sting of the implications against his son wasn't the worst part. To Dennis, his son's death became an informational tug-of-war between the Navy, which employed Nathan, and the Army, which was responsible for the fatal missile.

He quizzed officials for more details about the incident, and he questioned why the information took so long to compile.

"The Army, as far as I'm concerned, has not been as forthright, and I think they were evasive," he said.

Though the military appoints a liaison to work with families after a casualty, loved ones often wait months or years for a complete analysis, officials say.

"The desire is to complete the investigation in as expeditious a fashion as possible," said Cmdr. Nick Balice, chief of media at military Central Command headquarters in Florida, who declined to discuss specific details of Nathan's death.

"We'd all like to get conclusions as quickly as possible, but due to the complex nature of these investigations and the desire to ensure a thorough and accurate investigation is completed, they take time," Balice added.

Still, Akiko White, who was left behind to raise the couple's three children, wants more than window dressing and well-screened responses to her questions. "I think the system has to change," she said. "Something is not right."

Staff reporter Todd Greenberg, the Washington Post and Associated Press contributed to this article.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0526gitmo26.html

Prisoners tell FBI of Quran defilement

Richard B. Schmitt

Los Angeles Times

May. 26, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility told FBI interviewers in 2002 and 2003 that guards repeatedly desecrated the Quran and that perceived abuses of the Muslim holy book triggered unrest at the prison as well as possible suicide attempts, government documents showed Wednesday.

The allegations include an incident in which guards "flushed a Quran in the toilet," the FBI documents show. In another incident, a detainee refused to cooperate with investigators because of an interrogator reportedly "humiliating the Quran" while questioning another inmate.

The documents - the latest to be released as part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to shed light on U.S. treatment of prisoners in Cuba - parallel allegations of Quran desecration by prisoners in civil lawsuits against U.S. authorities and in interviews with news organizations.

No independent verification has been made of the prisoners' claims. The FBI reports say some prisoners, when asked, were not able to say they had experienced such abuse of the Quran firsthand, but had only heard rumors about it.

One prisoner, the FBI notes say, "considers it his duty as a Muslim to believe the rumor until it is proven untrue."

ACLU officials said the documents showed that U.S. officials failed to take seriously allegations that guards were desecrating the Quran when the claims first surfaced.

"The United States government's own documents show that it has known of numerous allegations of Quran desecration for a significant period of time," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer.

However, the Army instituted elaborate procedures to ensure sensitive treatment of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay facility two years ago. Some prisoners told FBI interviewers that conditions have since improved.

The latest government documents came as Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, in its annual report called the prison camp at Guantanamo "the gulag of our time" and urged Washington to shut it down.

Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary general, accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Amnesty's complaints were "ridiculous and unsupported by the facts." He said allegations of prisoner mistreatment are investigated and "we hold people accountable when there's abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again."

The Pentagon is conducting an internal investigation of reported abuses at the prison camp, but has declined to say what it has found so far.

The issue of desecration of the Quran flared this month after Newsweek magazine reported that U.S. investigators had confirmed an incident in which a Quran was flushed down a toilet at the prison and that the incident was going to be included in an upcoming government report. The article, which Newsweek subsequently retracted, was blamed for deadly rioting in the Muslim world.

Pentagon officials did not have any immediate comment on the new documents.

The documents included notes from a July 29, 2002, interview in which a detainee complained of ill treatment and beatings by guards.

"They flushed a Quran in the toilet. The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray," the detainee alleged, according to the report. "The guards still do these things."

The document did not elaborate, but other summaries of FBI interviews that were released showed prisoner complaints about mistreatment of the Quran occurred with some regularity.

They included allegations that guards threw the holy book on cell floors, or improperly touched it during searches. Others complained that guards would take away the Quran as punishment for failing to cooperate with investigators.

One prisoner said a guard's dropping of the Quran led to an "uprising" at the prison in July 2002. But the FBI notes assert that "in actuality" the detainee dropped the holy book and then blamed the guard.

Other prisoners believed that "issues regarding the Quran " led a fellow inmate to attempt suicide in January 2003, the notes of one interview showed.

"It was just a matter of time before something like this occurred," the detainee warned, according to the FBI notes. "The guards need to be made aware of how they are humiliating the Quran."

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how many times do i have to say the bottom line of any government is to steal money from one group of people and give it to another.

apache junction government buerocrat Ken Simpkins proves my point says "Restaurants are cash cows, ... With the average restaurant chain taking in approximately $50,000 in sales tax"

he knows where the city council is going to steal the money. the only question is who is the city council going to give the loot to.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0526image26.html

Ariz. cities try to shake bad reps to lure newcomers

Alia Beard Rau and Marissa Belles

The Arizona Republic

May. 26, 2005 12:00 AM

Arizona cities with less-than-stellar reputations are working on their image to attract some of the estimated 5 million newcomers expected to move to the state over the next 25 years.

Florence is kicking its prison-town reputation with a push to promote the town's history. Apache Junction is cleaning up its trailer-park image. Glendale is using sports arenas and festivals to revive its senior-citizen bedroom-community branding. Kingman is selling itself as a place to live instead of just a stop for gas. Mesa is drawing attention to itself with the new arts center and revitalization efforts.

Some experts say the image makeover is vital to attract new residents and businesses, but others suggest a municipality's reputation has little impact on choosing a new hometown.

Rob Melnick, director of Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy, says local governments are starting to market themselves the way businesses do, a trend he predicts will only increase as the Valley grows.

"We've all grown up believing certain products are better because we see and hear a lot of ads," he said. "Why would a city be any different?"

Melnick said image doesn't trump housing prices when it comes to choosing a hometown, but it is a deciding factor.

"If you buy a house with a national reputation like Scottsdale's reputation of being an upscale place, your equity is more likely to grow and maintain more than a place where you don't know how things are going to turn out," he said.

Melnick says investing in image can bring a city more residents and businesses.

But Jay Butler, director of the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University East, questions its impact.

"Every city is always trying to create this image that differentiates itself from everybody else," Butler said. "But I think right now the typical homeowner doesn't care. They're chasing the house."

He points to growth in areas that were housing developments before they became communities, like Maricopa and the San Tan/Johnson Ranch area in Pinal County, as proof.

Butler said cities would be better off focusing resources on attracting jobs.

"If cities want to grow, they'll have to attract the job base," he said. "Chandler didn't start to grow until it got Intel, and that changed its whole image."

Glendale still reforming

Glendale's work to reform its image has been a 12-year process that is still continuing, said Elaine Scruggs, longtime mayor of the West Valley city.

"Our old image was that there was nothing to do in Glendale, it was old, it was hard to find and the sidewalks rolled up at 5 p.m.," she said.

So the city created the downtown historic district, filled the Craftsman-style bungalows with shops and restaurants, and started holding festivals to attract visitors.

The construction of the Glendale Arena and the new stadium for the Arizona Cardinals is adding a new dimension to Glendale's image.

"The image of us as a sports-and-entertainment destination is almost on automatic pilot," Scruggs said.

With a population of more than 440,000, Mesa is the third-largest city in the state and the 40th-largest city in the nation. But it seems to get little attention outside its own borders.

Mesa craves attention

Mesa is seen as remarkably unremarkable, according to Dave Richins, a seven-year resident and co-chairman of Mesa Grande Community Alliance.

"We are very vanilla and don't really have a claim to fame like other cities," he said. "We are taking steps to revitalize downtown, but we aren't doing it to mold into some preconceived image."

The new Mesa Arts Center cost $94.5 million to build and started a chain reaction in downtown real estate, which Richins said had been static for 10 years.

"When plans were made for the center, 20 downtown properties changed hands," he said. "If the government takes steps toward redevelopment like they did with the Arts Center, the private sector will respond."

He hopes city officials will turn their sights to west Mesa, where he lives, and initiate redevelopment there as well. Right now, Mesa hopes to invest about $80 million in subsidies to develop the Riverview at Dobson mall on its western city limit, pulling into the complex a Bass Pro Shops.

"Part of Mesa's charm is the fact that we aren't a Phoenix or a Scottsdale, we don't have any type of reputation," Richins said. "I hope the city continues to strive for redevelopment, but not at the risk of losing who we are."

Dumping prison image

Florence, a Pinal County town southeast of Queen Creek, claims a population of 17,000. But as many as 13,000 of those residents are behind bars, locked up inside one of the town's several prisons. Prisons, including state, federal and private facilities, are Florence's largest employer.

Optometrist John Riley always thought Florence was just a prison town until he got off the highway one day and drove down Main Street. He was charmed enough by the blocks of historic buildings to open a practice there.

"We have a unique opportunity here to preserve some of that small-town feel and make this town a draw for people moving out this way," he said.

He and Vice Mayor Tom Celaya believe the biggest challenge is convincing outsiders that Florence is about history and not prisons.

"We've had a lot of difficulty getting the word out that we're not a prison town but a true old-fashioned community," Celaya said.

Town officials are working to pump funds into improving the historic downtown, attracting businesses and providing more amenities.

Pulte/Del Webb recently broke ground on the new Anthem at Merrill Ranch project in Florence. The developer maintains that a community's reputation doesn't always deter development.

"When we decide to develop in an area, it is because we've met with council and staff and we both are on the same page as far as image is concerned," said Jacque Petroulakis, Pulte/Del Webb's public information officer. "Development has the power to improve or enhance an image, so its not always the deciding factor going into it."

Florence High student Amber Cossins, 18, said the only way to change the stereotype is by word of mouth.

"When I first came here five years ago, I was thinking the kids would be maniacs in this prison town," she said. "But I found out quickly that the people are so wonderful."

AJ's progress is in view

In the shadow of the Superstition Mountains east of Mesa, Apache Junction claims some of the most spectacular views in the state. But the Pinal County city also claims a reputation as a haven for trailer parks and winter visitors.

Apache Junction is taking steps to shake its image, including moving City Hall out of an aging doublewide and into a $7 million municipal complex.

"We know we have an image problem, we aren't disputing that," City Manager George Hoffman said. "Change takes time. But recently, we've taken some major steps in the right direction."

Development Services Director Ken Simpkins cites the city's image problem as a major roadblock to job creation.

"Restaurants are cash cows, and the city has been looked at by at least five in the last year who all said, 'I really like the area, but we don't want our place of business near slums,' " Simpkins said.

"With the average restaurant chain taking in approximately $50,000 in sales tax, that amounts to a quarter of a million lost from potential development."

Sheila Hirn, a Realtor for Arizona Prime Estates in Apache Junction, said her customer base revolves around the image of a city, and the proof is in the fact that business is improving in Apache Junction for her.

"Apache Junction is attracting much more families than they used to, and that is the majority of my clientele," she said. "I am finding it much more difficult to sell houses in retirement communities than ever before."

To make the city more marketable, staff is offering incentives to new businesses, demanding that new buildings be of a higher quality, and cleaning up downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.

"Since I've moved here, I can only see the city getting better. And I think in 10 years there won't even be an image problem," said Nan Allen, a four-year resident of Apache Junction.

Kingman waking up

Kingman has always been a sleepy northern Arizona mining city and a convenient place to stop for gas on the way to Las Vegas.

It gained unwanted notoriety 10 years ago when it was discovered that Timothy McVeigh lived in Kingman shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing.

"Certainly it's something we all want to remember to prevent something like that from ever happening again, but that certainly is not Kingman's legacy," Mayor Monica Gates said. "We are trying to become known as the heart of Route 66."

She said the key to marketing Kingman will be to get the word out about the still affordable housing, cooler summer temperatures, clean air and light traffic.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0526maher26.html

Comedian blasts Ala. lawmaker who finds remarks treasonous

Wire services

May. 26, 2005 12:00 AM

Comedian Bill Maher fired back Wednesday at the congressman who demanded HBO axe his show over allegedly treasonous remarks.

"I'm not a congressman, I'm a comedian. There's nothing I can really do to help or hurt our troops," Maher blogged on huffingtonpost.com.

Maher took on Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.: "Shouldn't he be training his outrage at such problems as troops not having enough armor?"

Bachus took umbrage with Maher's remarks first aired May 13 on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Bachus caught a rerun of Maher pointing out the Army missed its recruiting goal by 42 percent in April: "More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club," Maher said; "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies."

Army Reserve Pfc. England was accused of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners.

"I think it borders on treason," Bachus said Monday of Maher's remark. "In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country."

"I don't want (Maher) prosecuted," Bachus said. "I want him off the air."

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-24-airspace_x.htm

Posted 5/24/2005 10:31 PM Updated 5/25/2005 8:31 AM

D.C. airspace daunting for those who protect it

By Mimi Hall and Alan Levin, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Helicopters unable to shoot down rogue planes. Military jets flying so fast they sometimes can't communicate with small aircraft. Laser-beam warning systems that work only on sunny days. And radios easily knocked out by a bolt of lightning.

Three-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, recent incursions into restricted airspace over the White House and Capitol reveal a system struggling to protect against another assault by air.

An errant plane was able to fly over Vice President Cheney's house this month and got within 3 miles of the White House.

With 2,000 square miles of restricted airspace up to 18,000 feet, "it is inherently difficult to patrol such a large area," says Chris Dancy of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

It's also perilous for small-plane pilots who are dependent on sometimes erratic and malfunctioning radios to communicate with authorities.

Hayden "Jim" Sheaffer, the Cessna pilot who flew deep into restricted airspace May 11 and caused mass evacuations and a government review of shoot-down procedures, told NBC on Tuesday that he feared he was about to be shot down.

He and a pilot trainee with him, Troy Martin, were initially approached in the sky by a Homeland Security Department Black Hawk helicopter. A pilot on the helicopter signaled the men to call on a radio frequency that turned out to be jammed. Martin said later that he wished the pilot had simply held up a "follow me" sign, according to his lawyer Mark McDermott.

The Homeland Security Department is considering just that.

Unable to get through by radio after the Black Hawk signaled to call on frequency 121.5, the Cessna pilots "didn't go one way or the other because they didn't know which way the helicopter wanted them to go," McDermott said.

Fighter jets, which fly too fast to communicate with signs or hand signals with pilots of slow-moving small planes, eventually fired flares that prompted Sheaffer to turn away from the White House.

Had a new system of ground-based lasers been in place when Sheaffer went astray, he might not have ventured so far into the restricted area. But whether the system could have helped would have depended on the weather that day.

The new lasers were put in place around Washington on Saturday. Defense officials won't say how much area is covered or where the machines are that send up the beams. The system works this way: When air traffic controllers spot a plane that has flown into the restricted space, a quick sequence of red-red-green beams are shot directly at it to let the pilot know he has entered a restricted zone.

First Lt. Lisa Citino of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) says the beams tell pilots, "You should just get out of the airspace, otherwise you will be engaged" by fighter jets.

A pilot of a small plane that had to be escorted out of restricted airspace by fighter jets Monday never had an opportunity to see the laser beams after a lightning strike caused him to lose radio contact with air traffic controllers.

The beams weren't turned on, Citino said, because it was an overcast day and they don't work through clouds.

A NORAD spokesman, Maj. Douglas Martin, said the beams were put in place to try to cut down on the number of times NORAD has to send fighter jets out to escort an airplane out of restricted space, something it has done more than 2,000 times since Sept. 11, 2001.

"It's a stop sign," he said. "If a person has hate in their heart and a desire to kill innocent people or they're drunk out of their skull, they're going to go through the stop sign." So far, he added, "thank God it's only people making mistakes."

After the Cessna scare on May 11, the Homeland Security Department is considering changing the way it responds to such incidents. Customs and Border Protection helicopters are generally the first to reach errant airplanes. But they have neither the firepower nor the authority to shoot down a plane — even if that's what the Defense Department wanted done.

Officials are considering having more heavily armed Coast Guard helicopters respond.

In an internal May 17 e-mail, confirmed by a department official, Homeland Security Undersecretary Randy Beardsworth wrote that Secretary Michael Chertoff wanted to explore whether the Coast Guard should take over the mission "under the control" of the Defense Department.

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-24-dc-airspace_x.htm

Posted 5/24/2005 11:14 PM

U.S. revisits Washington airspace rules

By Mimi Hall and Alan Levin, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Unauthorized planes that fly into restricted airspace over the nation's capital could be met by heavily armed helicopters flashing signs to "Follow Me," according to proposals under discussion by the Homeland Security Department.

The signs and other possible changes are designed to prevent some of the confusion that surrounded a May 11 incident with a small plane that violated Washington airspace. The pilot said he feared being shot down after he was unable to communicate with airborne federal agents due to a jammed radio frequency.

Thousands were evacuated as the plane flew within 3 miles of the White House. A Homeland Security official said Tuesday that the incident has prompted discussion about putting the "Follow Me" signs on board Black Hawk helicopters as a way to quickly communicate with confused pilots. The official refused to be named because the policy regarding the signs hasn't yet been approved. (Related story: D.C. airspace daunting for those who protect it)

A "Follow Me" instruction would be a simple way to tell pilots of stray planes that they need to change course and follow the helicopter away from Washington, the official said.

The Homeland Security Department also is debating whether more heavily armed Coast Guard helicopters should patrol restricted airspace, according to a department official.

Black Hawks used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which also is part of Homeland Security, are now responsible for patrolling the skies over Washington and escorting planes that enter its restricted airspace. The Defense Department can scramble fighter jets, if needed, but in 75% of the cases, the CBP helicopters get there first.

CBP pilots are authorized only to shoot under "law enforcement" rules and don't have weapons powerful enough to take down a plane. That means they can shoot only at the people in the planes.

During the May 11 incident, agents on the helicopter had flashed a sign at the pilot, Hayden "Jim" Sheaffer, 69, of Lititz, Pa. The sign bore the numbers "121.5," an effort to get him to tune in to the 121.5 radio frequency that authorities were monitoring.

But Sheaffer said his attempts to use the frequency failed because it was jammed because of an emergency beacon on the ground that interfered with the radio.

Sheaffer finally turned around after F-16 fighter jets fired warning flares near his plane. He told NBC's Today show on Tuesday that the incident was "very scary" and that he thought he was going to be "shot out of the sky."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-24-airspace_x.htm

Posted 5/24/2005 10:31 PM Updated 5/25/2005 8:31 AM

D.C. airspace daunting for those who protect it

By Mimi Hall and Alan Levin, USA TODAY

An errant plane was able to fly over Vice President Cheney's house this month and got within 3 miles of the White House.

With 2,000 square miles of restricted airspace up to 18,000 feet, "it is inherently difficult to patrol such a large area," says Chris Dancy of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

It's also perilous for small-plane pilots who are dependent on sometimes erratic and malfunctioning radios to communicate with authorities.

The Homeland Security Department is considering just that.

Fighter jets, which fly too fast to communicate with signs or hand signals with pilots of slow-moving small planes, eventually fired flares that prompted Sheaffer to turn away from the White House.

First Lt. Lisa Citino of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) says the beams tell pilots, "You should just get out of the airspace, otherwise you will be engaged" by fighter jets.

The beams weren't turned on, Citino said, because it was an overcast day and they don't work through clouds.

Officials are considering having more heavily armed Coast Guard helicopters respond.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111707300196643763,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus

Private Eyes In Terrorism Fight, Government Finds a Surprising Ally: FedEx

Since 9/11, Firms Cooperate More Often With Officials; Implications for Privacy UPS and the Post Office Balk

By ROBERT BLOCK Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

May 26, 2005; Page A1

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Before Sept. 11, 2001, when federal law-enforcement officials asked FedEx Corp. for help, the company had its limits. It wouldn't provide access to its databases. It often refused to lend uniforms or delivery trucks to agents for undercover operations, citing fears of retribution against employees as well as concerns about customer privacy.

Then came the attacks on New York and Washington and pleas from the government for private-sector help in fighting terrorism. Suddenly, the king of overnight delivery became one of homeland security's best friends.

FedEx has opened the international portion of its databases, including credit-card details, to government officials. It has created a police force recognized by the state of Tennessee that works alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The company has rolled out radiation detectors at overseas facilities to detect dirty bombs and donated an airplane to federal researchers looking for a defense against shoulder-fired missiles.

Moreover, the company is encouraging its 250,000 employees to be spotters of would-be terrorists. It is setting up a system designed to send reports of suspicious activities directly to the Department of Homeland Security via a special computer link.

FedEx's newfound enthusiasm for a frontline role in the war on terror shows how the relationship between business and government has changed in the past few years. In some cases, these changes are blurring the division between private commerce and public law enforcement.

After Sept. 11, the U.S. government altered the definition of a good corporate citizen to include help running down al Qaeda operatives, often asking companies to act as the eyes and ears of federal law enforcement. The Bush administration and Senate Republican leaders are currently pushing an updated version of the Patriot Act that would expand the ability of law-enforcement agencies to demand business records without a warrant. Already, some companies are voluntarily increasing their level of cooperation with the government, say law enforcement officials.

Federal agents privately praise Western Union for sharing information with Treasury and Homeland Security investigators about overseas money transfers. Time Warner Inc.'s America Online has set up a dedicated hotline to help police officers seeking AOL subscriber information and also proffers advice about wording subpoenas. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has a sophisticated supply-chain security system, has been helping U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents figure out how to better track international shipping, say Homeland Security officials.

Spokespeople for Western Union, AOL and Wal-Mart all say their companies take consumers' privacy seriously and that they cooperate with legal investigations. They wouldn't provide details about their cooperation with the government.

Business associations say the government's call to arms gets a good reception in part because companies want to prevent the disruption and bad publicity that would come from terrorists using their systems. "All we are trying to do is to protect our assets and not have our assets be used for bad purposes," says Fred Smith, FedEx's chief executive.

Supporters of an expanded role for business in homeland security note that U.S. industry has often been a government ally in wartime. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. manufacturers responded by retooling factories to produce tanks, trucks, planes and munitions.

Cooperation between businesses and federal law-enforcement agencies generally isn't advertised and customers are seldom aware of it. In some cases, people waive their right to privacy when they use a particular company's service. With FedEx, customers consent to having shipments inspected as soon as they hand over their packages and sign the shipping forms.

Lee Strickland, a retired Central Intelligence Agency analyst and a specialist in privacy issues, says the new cooperation between business and the government takes place in a legal "gray zone" that has never been tested in court. He says these relationships could undermine existing privacy laws that restrict what the government can do with information it collects directly from individuals. In general, the government can only use information for the express reason it's collected.

"Since you don't know what information is being shared and how it is being stored, or how it is coded or accessed, and since you don't know what the government is looking for, there is always a possibility that it could be factored into other decisions," says Mr. Strickland. He is now the director of the Center for Information Policy at the University of Maryland.

Privacy Concerns

Some companies in a position to assist aren't rushing to help. OnStar, General Motors Corp.'s in-car emergency communications system, says it won't provide information to authorities, such as the location of a vehicle, unless presented with a warrant. "OnStar philosophy is to err on the side of customer privacy," says Terry Sullivan, an OnStar spokesman. He says the company fears the public won't buy the system if people believe it's being used for surveillance.

Other shippers say they have refrained from granting a level of access similar to that of FedEx without court orders. At rival United Parcel Service Inc., spokesman David Bolger says the company won't disclose information about its customers' shipments unless required to do so by law or regulation.

The U.S. Postal Service says it doesn't provide customer payment information without a warrant. In addition, postal officials say, law-enforcement agencies are prohibited from collecting information from envelopes and packages sent through the mail without a court order.

Government officials say that the struggle against terrorism is an unorthodox fight where information and intelligence is as important as guns and bullets. Information is what FedEx has in spades.

To orchestrate its deliveries, FedEx has spent billions of dollars over the past 15 years on elaborate computer systems. It compiles troves of data about its customers and the six million packages carried daily across the world, tracking them from point of origin to final destination.

The company also maintains a large global security force, currently 500 strong. Before 9/11, it concentrated on combating employee theft and intercepting illegal shipments of narcotics, explosives or hazardous materials.

FedEx's change in mindset took place within hours of the attacks amid the confusion and frustration that followed. Mr. Smith sent a message to his subordinates "to do whatever it takes to cooperate" with federal agents, says FedEx spokeswoman Kristin Krause. This included opening up FedEx's operations in the Middle East to federal authorities and asking employees there to help investigators.

The reason behind the shift, FedEx security officials say: The company saw the nature of the threat changing. When the government wanted help fighting drugs and smuggling, FedEx felt many of its requests were intrusive and threatened to slow the pace of their deliveries.

When the worry was terrorism, Mr. Smith says, the company saw its entire system as vulnerable because trucks and planes have been the "instrument of choice" of extremists such as Timothy McVeigh as well as Islamist terrorists. FedEx's security team --which includes several former federal law-enforcement officials -- took tactics for thwarting drug traffickers and adapted them for use against terrorism. Among them was encouraging employees to report unusual activity, no matter how small.

In December 2001, according to court records in Illinois, a FedEx driver became suspicious after making a series of deliveries of boxes to an apartment complex in suburban Chicago. The cartons were always the same size and shape and came from the same address in Los Angeles. Worried there was something sinister afoot, the driver informed his bosses and FedEx called the police.

Suspecting narcotics or explosives, the police showed up at the FedEx depot with bomb- and drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs didn't signal there was anything illicit in the boxes. FedEx then invoked the authority granted to it by every customer, which the police don't automatically have, permitting it to inspect any package without a warrant.

With a police officer looking on, FedEx popped the carton. Instead of anything dangerous, the boxes contained several hundred pre-recorded compact discs. Local police launched an investigation that eventually uncovered a CD-bootlegging operation.

At FedEx's main hub in Memphis, Tenn., cartons and envelopes whiz around a maze of automatic conveyer belts past giant laser scanners charting each package's journey. The parcels are sorted by employees armed with pocket guides to help identify suspicious packages. Security guards keep watch through a network of cameras. Customs agents' cars marked with the Homeland Security logo are parked outside some of the buildings.

By law, all express courier services are required to provide space for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at their facilities. Since 9/11, FedEx has gone further and has granted customs inspectors access to the company's database of international shipments, which includes the name and address of a shipper, the package's origin and its final destination.

The databases also include credit-card information and other payment details that the government is not entitled to solicit outside of a criminal investigation. "Our guys just love it," says one senior customs official overseeing inspections at international courier companies.

The agents cross-reference the information from FedEx's systems with their own databases. That helps them flag suspicious packages for a manual inspection and also helps them determine whether credit cards have been used in other suspicious transactions. FedEx and customs officials say the close cooperation allows customs agents do their jobs faster and allows FedEx to avoid shipment delays.

Pat Jones, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, says having access to FedEx's database has resulted in the seizure of several packages, including forged Iowa drivers licenses sent from Argentina, although nothing related to terrorism.

Sitting in FedEx's huge Washington office, which has a commanding view of the Capitol building, Mr. Smith, 61 years old, dismisses privacy concerns stemming from his company's cooperation with federal agencies. He says people already hand over tremendous amounts of information to the government, including personal-income data and details contained on a driver's license.

"As far as asking people to identify who they are, I don't think that's a real imposition. And to make that information available to the people protecting the public, I don't understand why that's as controversial as that has become," says Mr. Smith, who started FedEx 34 years ago after two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Marine officer. He says FedEx is willing to cooperate with federal authorities "up to and including the line on which we would be doing a disservice to our shareholders."

Duty Calls

In a recent article in Chief Executive magazine, Mr. Smith wrote that his fellow corporate leaders had a duty to report suspicious activity. It's only by "training and empowering our own employees" that terrorism can be contained, he wrote.

Mr. Smith also sees a quid pro quo: In the post-Sept. 11 world, he sees the government sharing more with the private sector. As the president of the Security Task Force of the Business Roundtable -- an association of top U.S. chief executives -- Mr. Smith is leading a drive to gain access to the government's secret terrorist watch lists. He says they would be an invaluable tool to help companies screen employees.

So far the FBI, which controls the lists, says there's no sign the government will grant access to the classified databases. But FedEx already has access to some classified information through other channels.

Two years ago, after intense lobbying by FedEx of the Tennessee state legislature, the company was permitted to create a 10-man, state-recognized police force. FedEx police wear plain clothes and can investigate all types of crimes, request search warrants and make arrests on FedEx property. The courier cops say their main job is to protect company property and systems from abuse and fraud and help combat terrorists and criminals.

As a recognized police force in Tennessee, it has access to law-enforcement databases. FedEx also has a seat on a regional terrorism task force, overseen by the FBI, which has access to sensitive data regarding terrorist threats. Robert Bryden, the recently retired vice president of FedEx corporate security, says it's "remarkable" for a private company to have a seat on the task force. Across the country, FedEx is the only one, the FBI says.

FBI agent George Bolds, general counsel in the bureau's Memphis field office, says the bureau believes the FedEx police have a contribution to make. He says they can't go on raids or undertake surveillance missions with other task-force members.

The government also recognizes FedEx's potential as a vast human-intelligence network. The company's teams of drivers and delivery staff ply regular routes and visit homes and workplaces across the world. That puts them in a unique position to recognize potentially dangerous activity.

In 2002, the Department of Justice, under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, devised a program to create an army of domestic informants. Operation Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, envisioned workers such as couriers, meter readers, utility companies, truck drivers, letter carriers and train engineers organized into a force that would "report suspicious, publicly observable activity that could be related to terrorism," the government said at the time.

TIPS was supposed to be up and running by fall of 2002 but was abandoned after a public outcry and complaints from some companies. When UPS first heard about the program, its officials told the Department of Justice their employees would not participate, says spokesman Mr. Bolger. "We said we don't have time and our employees don't know what to look for. We are not law enforcement," he says.

After the collapse of TIPS, FedEx pressed ahead with its own program, one that embodied many of the same objectives, much to the delight of the government.

In a June 2003 speech delivered at a law enforcement conference, then-Assistant Attorney General Deborah J. Daniels praised the firm for demonstrating "the tremendous role that companies like FedEx can play in passing along information about publicly observed aberrant behavior."

Mr. Bryden, the former security chief, says FedEx worked with Homeland Security officials last summer to develop computer system that simplifies the reporting of suspicious behavior. FedEx spokeswoman Ms. Krause says the two sides met again in March and says the program should soon go through testing. The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the program. "We secure our supply chain and help the country," says Mr. Bryden. "And we believe that's exactly what our customers want."

---- Gary Fields, Glenn R. Simpson and Rick Brooks contributed to this article.

Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0527iraq-military27.html

Insurgents continue to target Iraqi police

Officers join up for higher wages

Patrick Quinn

Associated Press

May. 27, 2005 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In a reminder of the difficulty Iraqi security forces face in stopping insurgent attacks, violence claimed at least 15 lives Thursday in Baghdad including a car bomb that exploded near a police patrol, killing five people and wounding 17.

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told a small group of Western reporters that next week's planned crackdown, dubbed Operation Lightning, is designed "to restore the initiative to the government." Insurgents have killed more than 620 people since his government was announced on April 28.

"We will establish, with God's help, an impenetrable blockade surrounding Baghdad like a bracelet surrounds a wrist," Defense Minister Saadoun al-Duleimi said.

Iraqi authorities did not say how long the crackdown would last, and it was uncertain if the Iraq security services are capable of mounting a sustained operation. Except for a few elite units, most police officers are believed to have joined up for the higher pay the job provides - at $300 per month their salaries are triple the average wage.

Iraq has 89,400 security personnel attached to the Ministry of Interior, according to the U.S. military. This includes police, highway patrol and some commando units, although the figure may include some who have deserted. Another 75,800 forces are in the country's military, most of them in the army.

Jaafari said his government was working hard to recruit, train and equip its police and army but still needed support from 160,000 foreign troops, including 138,000 from the United States, to deal with the raging insurgency.

But it was unclear if the large concentration of security forces in the capital would cause a surge of violence in the rest of Iraq where car bombs, kidnappings and shooting are a day-to-day occurrence.

Northwest of Baghdad, in the city of Haditha, more than 1,000 U.S. troops continued a sweep for insurgents responsible for attacks against coalition troops. They ordered at least one airstrike Thursday against a suspected militant position.

At least 11 insurgents and one Marine have been killed since Operation New Market began Wednesday.

Insurgents continued to target Iraqi police and government officials in an attempt to undermine the new government. Gunmen shot dead Iraqi army Capt. Awas Youssif Hassan in the Khalis area northeast of Baghdad, said army Col. Abdulla al-Shimary.

Separately, gunmen in a speeding car fired automatic weapons at a group of people driving to work in Baghdad's southern Risala neighborhood, killing four Iraqis, including a university professor and a translator working for the U.S. military, said police Lt. Hussam Noori.

A top Industry Ministry official, Samir Nima Ghaidan, was shot dead by gunmen while leaving his office in northern Baghdad's Mustansiriyah Square to return home, said army Capt. Hussein Hakim. Ghaidan ran the ministry's transport department.

In one of the insurgency's most bizarre attacks to date, someone tied a crude homemade bomb to a dog, which exploded near an Iraqi army patrol south of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, police said. None of the soldiers was harmed in the blast.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0527sheriff27.html

Apache County sheriff indicted

Misuse of public money alleged

Mark Shaffer

Republic Flagstaff Bureau

May. 27, 2005 12:00 AM

Apache County's top cop has been indicted by a state grand jury in the suspected theft and misuse of about $8,000 in public money over a five-year period.

Sheriff Brian Hounshell, 39, who also is one of 16 members of the state's Homeland Security Council, was indicted late Wednesday on two counts of felony misuse of public monies and one count each of theft and fraudulent schemes and artifices.

Andrea Esquer, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General's Office, said a second person also has been charged with two counts of misusing public money.

The name of that person is expected to be released today after court papers are served, Esquer said.

The probe began seven months ago in the northeastern Arizona county when the state served subpoenas on the Apache County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff's Department for financial and personnel documents.

The county also has hired an outside agency to conduct another probe of the sheriff's office after a grievance was filed recently by one of the department's employees.

Esquer said she could not elaborate on the indictment, which provided few details other than the crimes occurred between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2004.

The indictment accuses Hounshell of "using Apache County funds for personal property or services arising in or from" Apache, Maricopa, Gila, Navajo and Coconino counties.

Hounshell has been sheriff for six years.

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Knife Control?????

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0527britain-knives27.html

Doctors oppose long, pointy knives

John Schwartz

New York Times

May. 27, 2005 12:00 AM

Warning: Long, pointy knives may be hazardous to your health.

The authors of an editorial in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal have called for knife reform. The editorial, "Reducing knife crime: We need to ban the sale of long, pointed kitchen knives," notes that the knives are being used to stab people as well as roasts and the odd tin of Spam.

The authors of the essay, Drs. Emma Hern, Will Glazebrook and Mike Beckett of the West Middlesex University Hospital in London, called for laws requiring knife manufacturers to redesign their wares with rounded, blunt tips. advertisement

The researchers noted that the rate of violent crime in Britain rose nearly 18 percent from 2003 to 2004 and that in the first two weeks of 2005, 15 killings and 16 non-fatal attacks involved stabbings. In an unusual move for a scholarly work, the researchers cited a January headline from the Daily Express, a London tabloid: "Britain is in the grip of knives terror; third of murder victims are now stabbed to death." Hern said that "we came up with the idea and tossed it into the pot" to get people talking about crime reduction. "Whether it's a sensible solution to this problem or not, I'm not sure."

In the United States, where people are more likely to debate gun control than knife control, partisans on both sides sounded amused. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, asked, "Are they going to have everybody using plastic knives and forks and spoons in their own homes, like they do in airlines?"

Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which supports gun control, joked, "Can sharp stick control be far behind?" He said people in his movement are "envious" of Britain for having such problems. "In America, we can't even come to an agreement that guns are dangerous and we should make them safer," he said.

The editorial's authors argued that the pointed tip is a vestigial feature from less-mannered ages, when people used it to spear meat. They said they interviewed 10 chefs in England and "none gave a reason why the long, pointed knife was essential," though short, pointed knives were useful.

An American chef, however, disagreed with the proposal. "This is yet another sign of the coming apocalypse," said Anthony Bourdain, executive chef at Les Halles and author of Kitchen Confidential.

A knife, he said, is a beloved tool of the trade and not a thing to be shaped by bureaucrats. A chef's relationship with his knives develops over decades of training and work, he said, adding, "Its weight, its shape - these are all extensions of our arms and, in many ways, our personalities."

He compared the editorial to efforts to ban unpasteurized cheese. "Where there is no risk," he said, "there is no pleasure."

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http://ktla.trb.com/news/local/ktla-me-sexoffender25may25-lat,0,7673734.story?coll=ktla-news-1

From the Los Angeles Times

Riverside County OKs Limits for Sex Offenders

The ordinance requires that the state provide Riverside County 60 days' notice before the release of any felony sex offenders in the county.

By Susannah Rosenblatt

Times Staff Writer

May 25, 2005

After weeks of protests from Mead Valley residents living near a high-risk paroled sex offender, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed an ordinance Tuesday that tightens restrictions on where paroled offenders can live.

The ordinance was written by Supervisor Jeff Stone this month after convicted rapist David Allyn Dokich, 52, was placed in a Mead Valley neighborhood, near Perris.

Dokich was convicted of the 1982 rape of a 15-year-old girl in his Dana Point apartment and of the kidnapping and rape of a 16-year-old Riverside County girl in 1985 while he was on parole.

The ordinance requires that the state provide Riverside County 60 days' notice before the release of any felony sex offenders in the county.

It prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 1½ miles of schools, libraries, parks or recreational centers where minors gather. The ordinance also requires offenders to wear a tamper-proof satellite tracking device at all times.

California law mandates that the state give counties 45 days' notice when violent felons are paroled and prohibits sex offender parolees from living within a quarter-mile of elementary and junior high schools.

County Counsel William Katzenstein expressed reservations about the county ordinance, arguing that Riverside County had no jurisdiction over California's parole guidelines.

State legislators "control this area of the law 100%," he told the supervisors Tuesday.

The ordinance went into effect immediately but was adopted "conditional to and subject to review by the California state attorney general," Katzenstein said.

Although the attorney general could issue a legal opinion on the ordinance, the office does not yet have an official stance on the county's legislation, said agency spokeswoman Mariam Bedrosian.

State parole officials will not alter their monitoring or housing of Dokich without direction from state corrections officials, said Jeff Fagot, an acting regional parole administrator for the state Parole Operations Division 4 in Diamond Bar.

Despite community outrage, state parole officials believe that Dokich's residence on Old Elsinore Road is the best location for him.

"This is a sparsely populated community," Fagot said. There are no immediate plans to transfer Dokich, he said.

Dokich is classified as a high-risk sex offender, because he has two or more convictions for certain sex crimes.

The ordinance was passed after angry comments from several of the nearly 30 Mead Valley residents who attended the board meeting, many with their young and teenage children in tow.

Dokich is "just a threat and a danger to our children," Deanna Piña, mother of four, told the board.

"We will do whatever we have to do to get him removed," said Cindy Ramirez, a Mead Valley mother of three.

The board's action Tuesday gave area parents "a little bit of hope," Ramirez said.

Dokich is restricted to the house 24 hours a day and must wear an electronic monitoring device, Fagot said. He lives with five other parolees, two of whom are also sex offenders.

State parole agents have been stationed at the house at night for several weeks, Fagot said, and the agency is expecting the county's help in obtaining a global positioning device for Dokich soon.

Stone criticized what he characterized as the state's permissive attitude toward paroled sex offenders and the state parole board's last-minute notification of Mead Valley residents.

"The state is not fulfilling their obligation to monitor these sexual deviants," Stone said. "I don't want any more Samantha Runnions in the county of Riverside."

Five-year-old Runnion was abducted from outside her Stanton home, sexually assaulted and murdered in 2002 by Alejandro Avila of Lake Elsinore. An Orange County jury last week voted to sentence Avila to death.

Stone is working with local officials to organize a statewide ballot initiative drive to toughen laws governing California's roughly 85,000 registered sex offenders. Riverside County has at least 2,291 registered sex offenders, according to the attorney general's Megan's Law website.

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department is collaborating with Stone on the initiative, since Tuesday's ordinance was largely symbolic, said Sheriff Bob Doyle.

Legislators "need to tighten the system up a little bit," said Doyle, who added that extra sheriff's deputies were patrolling the area around Dokich's home.

"We're doing everything we can to keep an eye on the guy and make sure that he knows that," Doyle said.

California officials "don't have the tools in terms of the laws to deal with the sexual predators the way they should," said Supervisor John F. Tavaglione.

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http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/05/25/amnesty_takes_aim_at_gulag_in_guantanamo/

Amnesty takes aim at 'gulag' in Guantanamo

By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press Writer | May 25, 2005

LONDON -- Amnesty International castigated the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as a failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time" in the human rights group's harshest rebuke yet of American detention policies.

Amnesty urged Washington to shut down the prison at the U.S. Navy's base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some 540 men are held on suspicion of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or the al-Qaida terror network. Some have been jailed for more than three years without charge.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Amnesty's complaints were "ridiculous and unsupported by the facts." He said allegations of prisoner mistreatment are investigated.

"We hold people accountable when there's abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again. And we do so in a very public way for the world to see that we lead by example and that we do have values that we hold very dearly and believe in," McClellan told reporters.

In its annual report, Amnesty accused governments around the world of abandoning human rights protections. It said Sudan failed to protect its people from one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and charged Haiti promoted human rights abusers.

But one of the biggest disappointments in the human rights arena was with the United States, Amnesty said, "after evidence came to light that the U.S. administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the U.N. Convention against Torture."

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group issued a 308-page annual report that accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

The use of the term gulag refers to the extensive system of prison camps in the former Soviet Union, many in remote regions of Siberia and specifically designed to hold political prisoners. The Soviets took over the system from the czarist government and expanded it after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Untold thousands of prisoners of the so-called gulags died from hunger, cold, harsh treatment and overwork.

The prison camp at Guantanamo has been in the spotlight over the past year since the FBI cited cases of aggressive interrogation techniques and detainee mistreatment. The U.S. government has also been criticized for not charging or trying prisoners who are classified as enemy combatants, a vague distinction with fewer legal protections than prisoners of war get under the Geneva Conventions.

Some prisoners have challenged their detentions in U.S. courts but their cases are stalled by appeals filed by the U.S. government and subsequent arguments.

"Not a single case from some 500 men has reached the courts," Khan said.

In a statement, the Defense Department said that "the detention of enemy combatants is not criminal in nature, but to prevent them from continuing to fight against the United States in the War on Terrorism."

It also said that it continued to evaluate whether detainees should be sent home and that review tribunals "provided an appropriate venue for detainees to meaningfully challenge their enemy combatant designation."

"This is an unprecedented level of process being provided to our enemies in a time of war," the statement said.

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, which has also been critical of practices at Guantanamo, is the only independent group to have access to the detainees. Amnesty has been refused access to the prison, although it was allowed to watch pretrial hearings for 15 detainees who have been charged.

Amnesty has frequently criticized U.S. detention policies instituted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but its latest report takes a harsher tone. It accuses Washington of trying to "sanitize" abuse of detainees and failing to give prisoners legal recourse to challenge their detentions.

The report also takes aim at recent abuse allegations that have surfaced in FBI documents as well as prisoner testimonies, echoing concerns from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Red Cross said last week it had told U.S. authorities of detainee allegations that Qurans had been desecrated. It also offered a rare public rebuke in late 2003, calling the prisoners' prolonged detentions "worrying."

Declassified FBI records released Wednesday showed that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just four months after the first detainees arrived from Afghanistan, that U.S. military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran.

Another detainee stated he had been beaten unconscious at Guantanamo Bay early in 2002, a period in which U.S. interrogators were pressing hard for information on al-Qaida.

Amnesty singled out Sudan as one of the worst violators of human rights last year for the devastation caused by conflict in its Darfur region. At least 180,000 people have died -- many from hunger and disease -- and about 2 million have fled their homes to escape fighting among rebels, militias and government troops.

Sudan's government not only turned its back on its people, but the United Nations and African Union took too long to try to help those suffering in Darfur, Amnesty said.

Amnesty also criticized the African Union and the international community for not taking action on Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's party has been accused of rigging elections, repressing opponents and driving agriculture to the brink of collapse.

In Haiti, human rights violators who led the rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year were able to retake key positions, while the government struggled to maintain control from armed groups, Amnesty said.

The group accused Israeli soldiers of operating outside international law by using torture, destroying property and obstructing medical assistance in the West Bank and Gaza. It also condemned the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants.

In Asia, people were jailed indefinitely without trial in Malaysia and Singapore, religious minorities were persecuted in China and Vietnam and security forces committed extra-judicial killings in Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia, Amnesty said.

------

On the Net:

Amnesty International: www.amnesty.org

Defense Department: www.defenselink.mil/news/detainees.html

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/wihttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/wiccans_divorce_order;_ylt=Ai.2Vgb709a7YGjKN_D98YGs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2bm5xNHVjBHNlYwNtcA--ccans_divorce_order

(sorry -- tinyurl.com wasn't working when I posted this)

Divorced Wiccans Fight Judge's Order

By KEN KUSMER, Associated Press Writer Thu May 26, 8:26 PM ET

INDIANAPOLIS - A Wiccan activist and his ex-wife are challenging a

court's order that they must protect their 9-year-old son from what it

calls their "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

click here

The Indiana Civil Liberties Union has appealed the stipulation written

into the couple's divorce order, saying it is unconstitutionally vague

because it does not define mainstream religion.

Thomas Jones, a Wiccan activist who has coordinated Pagan Pride Day in

Indianapolis for six years, said he and his ex-wife, Tammy Bristol,

were stunned by the order. Neither parent has taken their son to any

Wiccan rituals since it was issued, he said.

"We both had an instant resolve to challenge it. We could not accept

it," Jones said Thursday. "I'm afraid I'll lose my son if I let him

around when I practice my religion."

A court commissioner wrote the unusual order after a routine report by

the court's Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau noted that both Jones

and his ex-wife are pagans who send their son, Archer, to a Catholic

elementary school.

In the order, the parents were "directed to take such steps as are

needed to shelter Archer from involvement and observation of these

non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals." The judge let the

wording stand.

The order has been criticized by various religious and advocacy groups.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Americans

United for Separation of Church and State, said judges cannot

substitute their religious judgment for that of parents in regard to

the upbringing of children.

"This is an absurd result, because in the eyes of the law being a

pagan should be no different from being a Presbyterian," he said.

Wiccans contend their religion is becoming more mainstream. The

parents' appeal says there were about 1 million pagans worldwide in

2002, more than the numbers who practice Sikhism, Taoism and other

established religions in the United States.

Wiccans consider themselves witches, pagans or neo-pagans, and say

their religion is based on respect for the earth, nature and the cycle

of the seasons.

"There continues to be misunderstanding and prejudice and

discrimination, not only against Wicca but against any religion that

is not centered on monotheism," said the Rev. Elena Fox, high

priestess and senior minister of Circle Sanctuary, a Wiccan church and

pagan resource center near Madison, Wis.

The head of a conservative Christian group also sided with the Wiccans.

"The parents have the right to raise their child in that faith, just

as I have the right to raise my child in the Christian faith," said

Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of

Indiana.

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http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7106/1/271/

Shocking reports reveal U.S. torture widespread

2005 Editions May 28, 2005

Author: Susan Webb

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/26/05 13:30

‘Architects of torture policy must be held accountable’

New reports of torture of detainees show the U.S. as a global enforcer gone wild.

This week, Human Rights Watch charged that U.S. FBI agents operating in Pakistan repeatedly interrogated and threatened two U.S. citizens of Pakistani origin who were unlawfully detained and tortured by Pakistani security services. The two were abducted from their Karachi home last August, and released this April without being charged. During eight months of interrogation and torture, they were questioned at least six times by FBI agents, who did nothing to stop the torture — including beatings with whips and rods — or provide consular help. Instead, the two said, the agents threatened to send them to Guantanamo if they did not “confess” to terrorist involvement.

A U.S. Marine writes an identification number on the forehead of a “detained” Iraqi man in Haditha, Iraq, May 25. Evidence of “systemic abuse and humiliation of Muslim men” by U.S. forces points to a “torture policy” originating from the White House and Pentagon.

Last week, The New York Times published a report on torture at a U.S. detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, based on leaked files of an Army investigation into the 2002 deaths of two Afghan detainees. Among the details:

• a prisoner “made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water … to soften him up for questioning.”

• repeated use of the “peroneal strike — a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.” A police officer involved in training told a soldier “he would never use such strikes because they would ‘tear up’ a prisoner’s legs,” Times reporter Tim Golden wrote, but in Afghanistan “the usual rules did not seem to apply.”

• an Army interrogator reported by a detainee to have “pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner’s face and threatened to rape him.”

Autopsies showed the two deaths had been caused by “blunt force trauma” to the legs. Soldiers said the two had been repeatedly beaten while shackled. Nevertheless, investigators initially recommended closing the case without criminal charges.

Eventually, the Army found “probable cause” to charge 27 officers and enlistees. Over two years later, only seven have been charged, and no one has been convicted. Many Bagram interrogators, and their officer, Capt. Carolyn Wood, were redeployed to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. An Army investigation said Wood implemented “remarkably similar” techniques there.

New Army documents released under court order last week are filled with additional instances of torture and abuse by U.S. forces. In Ramadi, Iraq, in 2003, an Army captain took an Iraqi welder into the desert, made him dig his own grave, threatened to kill him, and had other soldiers stage a shooting. An Army master sergeant knocked an Iraqi detainee to the ground, repeatedly kicked him in the groin, abdomen and head, and encouraged subordinates to do likewise. A staff sergeant held a detainee’s legs apart while other soldiers kicked him in the groin, abdomen and head. Two Iraqi men detained in Samarra were driven to a bridge where a platoon leader ordered them pushed into the river. One of the Iraqis could not swim and drowned. One soldier told investigators the chain of command had instructed the soldiers not to cooperate with the investigation, and to deny they pushed the men into the river.

The nearly 2,000 pages of documents were released after a federal court ordered the Defense Department to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace.

In March the ACLU and several other groups filed suit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of eight detainees who were “subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” One was held at Kandahar and Bagram, Afghanistan, in July and August 2003. His treatment included “ beatings, placement in restraints and positions calculated to cause pain, verbal abuse of a sexual nature, humiliation by being photographed while naked, denial of water, intentional deprivation of necessary medication exacerbated by physical abuse, intentional and prolonged exposure to dangerous temperature extremes, and sleep deprivation.”

Another plaintiff, held by the U.S. military at various locations in Iraq from July 2003 to June 2004, was subjected to “severe beatings to the point of unconsciousness, stabbing and mutilation, isolation while naked and hooded in a wooden coffin-like box, prolonged sleep deprivation enforced by beatings, deprivation of adequate food and water, mock execution and death threats.” One Iraqi detainee charged that soldiers taunted him by having a military dog pick up the Koran in its mouth.

“While the White House blames Newsweek magazine for damaging America’s reputation in the Muslim world, the Army’s own investigations show systemic abuse and humiliation of Muslim men by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. He said “high-ranking officials who allow the continuing abuse and torture” must be held accountable.

Amnesty International head Irene Khan condemned “cynical attempts to redefine and sanitize torture.” William Schulz, the group’s U.S. executive director, compared the U.S. torture practices to “a virus” and said the government’s response “amounts to a whitewash” of “those who schemed to authorize those actions, sometimes from the comfort of government buildings.”

“The architects of torture policy” must not “get off scot-free,” he said.

suewebb@pww.org

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http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7106/1/271/

Shocking reports reveal U.S. torture widespread

2005 Editions May 28, 2005

Author: Susan Webb

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/26/05 13:30

‘Architects of torture policy must be held accountable’

New reports of torture of detainees show the U.S. as a global enforcer gone wild.

• a prisoner “made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water … to soften him up for questioning.”

• an Army interrogator reported by a detainee to have “pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner’s face and threatened to rape him.”

“The architects of torture policy” must not “get off scot-free,” he said.

suewebb@pww.org

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http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7110/1/271/

Portland pullout from FBI task force hailed

Author: Tim Wheeler

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/26/05 13:49

PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland, City of Roses, won a proud distinction last month. It is the first municipality in the nation to pull out of the Justice Department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), a clear rejection of the Bush administration’s politics of fear.

“I think the City Council and Mayor (Tom) Potter are so courageous,” said Alan Graf, a National Lawyer’s Guild lawyer who serves as interim director of the Portland-based Northwest Center for Constitutional Rights (NCCR).

This reporter intervewed Graf by cell-phone while he vacationed with his grandchildren on the Oregon coast. The mayor and City Council, he said, stood up to tremendous pressure in terminating ties to the JTTF. The council vote was 4 to 1.

“This is a message to the Bush Administration that Portland is determined to defend our civil and constitutional rights,” Graf said. “Since Potter served for seven years as Portland’s chief of police, he was in a strong position to take this stand. I was so proud that I bought boxes of chocolates and delivered them to the mayor and each of the council members who voted to kick the FBI out of Portland.”

Ironically, the NCCR was born from a recent victory by victims of Portland police brutality. The 11 men and women had filed a lawsuit accusing the Portland Police Department of pepper spraying them on two occasions when President George W. Bush visited Portland for fundraisers and political rallies.

A federal judge, two weeks ago, ordered Portland to pay more than $800,000 in lawyers fees and damages for the brutality. Many of the plaintiffs then turned over their cash awards to help found the NCCR.

Graf said he was present as a legal observer when the police attacked the demonstrators August 22, 2002 and again in Mar. 2003. “I was pepper sprayed myself,” he said. “This was a totally peaceful demonstration. There were people in wheelchairs, little kids blowing bubbles. And all of a sudden it was Darth Vader and the Evil Empire. The police just advanced and attacked us with pepper spray. A lot of people were hurt.”

He added, “I have four grandchildren. What kind of nation do we want to leave them? The horror of war and repression that is being foisted upon us and the rest of the world?”

Continued on page 16Continued from page 3

The readiness of the plaintiffs to turn over part or all of their damage awards to start the NCCR, “proves just how deeply committed these people are to protecting our civil liberties and civil rights,” Graf said. He gave half his earnings from the case, which consumed 3,900 hours of research and litigation for a team of lawyers.

“The police gave as their reason for attacking us that the Republican donors were having trouble gettting through the crowd of protesters to attend the fund raiser,” Graf said. “But the police had no trouble identifying these wealthy Republicans. They stood out like manure in a flower bed.”

As for the JTTF controversy, he said, the immediate cause of the dispute was the demand by Potter and Portland Chief of Police Derrick Foxworth that they be granted the same “top secret” clearance as the Portland police officers assigned to the FBI-directed Task Force. Without that full access, there would be no way to insure the JTTF operates within the bounds of Oregon law and the state Constitution, they argued.

Robert Jordan, the FBI’s highest ranking agent in Portland, told a news conference the demand is “not feasible or reasonable” since no other mayor in the 100 cities and towns with JTTF teams has been granted top secret clearance.

David Fidanque, director of the Oregon branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, retorted, “There is ample evidence that several FBI task forces elsewhere have targeted individuals because of their political or religious affiliations.”

Almost a year after Portland lawyer Brandon Mayfield was cleared of any involvement in terrorism, Fidanque added, “Portland officials still don’t know what, if any, involvement Portland police had in the investigation.”

He was referring to the arrest of Mayfield, a convert to Islam, on bogus charges that he was involved in the bombing of the passenger train in Madrid that killed hundreds. He was arrested by the FBI and held for weeks incommunicado despite warnings by Spanish officials that Mayfield was innocent.

Portland had been a participant in the JTTF since 1997 but the issue loomed large after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft rammed the USA Patriot Act through, opening the way for nationwide racial, political and religious surveillance and profiling in the name of “war on terrorism.” Many cities, including Portland, have since passed resolutions of non-cooperation with the Patriot Act.

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http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7069/1/270/

Phila. MOVE tragedy recalled

Author: Rosita Johnson

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/19/05 11:42

Over 200 MOVE supporters and members gathered May 14 near the site where Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the group’s row house 20 years ago. Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor ordered the fire department “to let the fire burn.” Eleven MOVE members, including five children, died in the blaze.

Two members who escaped testified that police fired on those who tried to leave the burning house. Sixty-one houses in the block burned to the ground leaving 250 people homeless. Then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first African American mayor, knew about the police plan to drop the explosive on the house and later apologized. A 1985 investigation report condemned government officials for irresponsibility but no city officials or employees faced criminal charges. Ramona Africa, a victim, was convicted of riot and conspiracy and served 7 years in prison. She sued the city and received a $1.5 million settlement.

“It makes no sense, even today,” said William H. Brown III, the lawyer who chaired the investigation. “Every time I think about it, the angrier I get. There was no reason to drop that bomb.”

phillyrose1@hotmail.com

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http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7095/1/270/

Leak shows U.S. ‘fixed’ intelligence to sell war

Author: C.F. Niles

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/19/05 12:55

Classified British documents, recently published in The Times of London, reveal that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair secretly agreed to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein and had discussed “fixing” intelligence and facts to support that decision, months before congressional authorization was sought.

Among the documents was a memo labeled “secret and strictly personal – UK eyes only,” reporting on a July 23, 2002, meeting attended by Blair and other top British officials. According to the memo, the head of Britain’s MI-6 intelligence agency, Richard Dearlove, reported that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD, but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Bush officials “had no patience with the UN route,” the memo said, and “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told attendees it seemed “clear that Bush had made up his mind to go to war” although the case for war was “thin.” Straw noted that “Hussein was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

Attorney General Peter Goldsmith advised the group that “the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action,” and that claims of self-defense and humanitarian intervention could not be argued successfully. Nevertheless, the memo shows Blair and other British officials focused on finding ways to justify collaborating with the U.S. on a military attack on Iraq. “If the political context were right, people would support regime change,” Blair said.

Based on Bush administration claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S., Congress voted in October 2002 to support military action.

Eighty-nine members of Congress have signed a letter asking Bush for an explanation, saying the British report “raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own administration.”

The author of the letter, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the leading Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, “While the president of the United States was telling the citizens and the Congress that he had no intention to start a war with Iraq, he was working very closely with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone conclusion.”

British officials have not disputed the document’s authenticity. A spokesman for Blair said, “At the end of the day, nobody pushed the diplomatic route harder than the British government.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied that intelligence was “fixed,” telling reporters, “Anyone who wants to know how the intelligence was used only has to go back and read everything that was said in public about the lead-up to the war.”

But, in the recent Senate hearings on the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, testimony by State Department and intelligence officials showed a clear pattern of heavy pressure on intelligence agencies to come up with “facts” to fit the agendas of administration warhawks.

Moreover, it has now been widely reported by journalists like Bob Woodward and others that U.S. planning for an invasion of Iraq began as far back as November 2001, if not earlier.

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the arizona and federal constitions both specificly only say freedom of religion if your not part of a crackpot religous cult :) yea sure

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0528coloradotheft28.html

Court seizes $100 mil in polygamist sect's funds

Jeffs accused of using trust to silence critics

Robert Anglen

The Arizona Republic

May. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

Land, housing and assets belonging to the nation's largest polygamous community and estimated to be worth more than $100 million were temporarily frozen Friday by a Utah court.

The ruling effectively wrests financial power of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, who for years has controlled the school district, municipal government and most of the property in the isolated towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.

Judge Robert Adkins temporarily froze a trust fund for the church and suspended Jeffs and five other trustees, saying he found sufficient evidence that they committed a breach of faith by selling property to church insiders for less than market value.

The FLDS is a breakaway sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The trust, called the United Effort Plan, encompasses almost all the sect's assets and was supposed to be shared among 6,000 members, which, unlike the mainstream Mormon religion, practices polygamy.

But authorities in Utah and Arizona say that Jeffs has been using his control of the trust to silence critics. He has excommunicated dozens of the sect's highest-ranking officials, ordering them out of their trust-owned homes, kicking them out of the community and reassigning their multiple wives to other men.

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff praised the court's decision Friday. "This ruling is a major step toward reducing the arbitrary power of Warren Jeffs and protecting the trust from his manipulation, liquidation and misuse," Goddard said Friday.

"For the past two years, I've worked with the Utah attorney general on a coordinated effort to investigate all credible allegations of child abuse, sexual exploitation, welfare fraud, tax evasion and other financial wrongdoing. The events of this week show we are making good progress."

Jeffs and other trustees were not notified of Friday's court hearing for fear that they would attempt to sell even more church property.

Neither Jeffs nor other church members could be reached for comment Friday. But the church last year bought a ranch in Texas, where it appears to be building a new headquarters.

Adkins scheduled a June 22 hearing to determine if Jeffs and the other trustees should be permanently removed from the trust and replaced by an independent third party.

The court decision comes three days after Arizona investigators served a search warrant on the Colorado City Unified School District, where authorities say Jeffs' followers raided the public treasury for personal gain.

School funds have been used to buy a small airplane, a four-wheel-drive pickup truck and a Ford Excursion, according to investigators, who seized financial records and computers during the search.

The district's superintendent, business manager and assistant business manager, all members of the sect, gave away school vehicles and school property to the church-controlled city government, according to state investigators.

They also allege that school officials allowed church members the free use of school equipment, wrote checks to city police officers for travel expenses and spent up to $900,000 on miscellaneous expenses since 2000.

In early 2000, investigators say a dispute with a splinter group of the church caused Jeffs to order church members to withdraw their students from the public school, leaving only 400 students enrolled there.

Although virtually all the students who remained belonged to the splinter group, members of Jeffs' church retained control of the School Board and administrative offices.

"We know they have a very large payroll relative to the size of their student body," Goddard said. "That raises questions of who is benefiting from it and what are their motivations."

The Arizona Department of Education shows that the Colorado City Unified School District had a budget of $4.5 million this year. But the school district has been plagued by deficit spending and bounced paychecks issued to employees.

The Arizona School Risk Retention Trust, which insures school districts, covered the bounced checks to avert lawsuits. It is now owed about $1.5 million. According to a recent study commissioned by the trust, the school district overspent its budget by $432,000 last year and faces a deficit of $1.2 million.

District Superintendent Alvin Barlow, Business Manager Jeffrey Jessop and Assistant Business Manager Oliver Barlow did not return calls Friday.

Goddard said the search warrant was served to ensure that records do not disappear.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0527wantedrabbi-ON.html

Arrest warrant issued for rabbi in child molestation case

Associated Press

May. 27, 2005 03:55 PM

PRESCOTT - A felony warrant has been issued for the arrest of a rabbi accused of child molestation and sexual abuse, authorities said.

Yavapai County prosecutors said David Lipman, 55, faces 11 counts of child molestation and five counts of sexual abuse that stem from an investigation involving two girls, ages 16 and 14.

Prescott Justice Court Judge Arthur Markham signed a warrant Thursday for Lipman's arrest.

City police received a call on May 13 from a Child Protective Services employee who reported possible sexual abuse of two girls.

That prompted a criminal investigation against Lipman, who admitted to inappropriate touching, according to Prescott Police Det. Robert Peoples.

Lipman was placed on administrative leave Monday from Temple B'rith Shalom, where he has been rabbi since April 2002 of a congregation with about 300 members.

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clever government buerocrats use electricty to power warning systems that are used to warn people about electric plant failures

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0528sirens28.html

Blackouts could disable nuclear plant warnings

Ken Alltucker

The Arizona Republic

May. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

A new federal report indicates that a power blackout would disable all emergency sirens around 28 nuclear power plants and knock out some sirens around Palo Verde and 17 other plants nationwide.

Federal regulations require power plant operators to install sirens to notify all residents within a 10-mile radius of a nuclear plant in the event of a meltdown or other nuclear crisis.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week released data showing that 28 power plants depend solely on electricity to power the sirens, a system that would be rendered useless if power failed. An additional 17 plants have backup power sources for all sirens.

The agency released the information after a request made by a coalition of 17 activist groups and local governments.

Solar or batteries provide reserve power sources for 13 of 42 emergency sirens surrounding the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Wintersburg, but an additional 29 sirens depend on electricity, according to plant operator Arizona Public Service Co.

Utility spokesman Jim McDonald said the company plans to convert those sirens to a more efficient technology that would require less power and include battery backups.

"As a result, we will have battery backup (for all sirens) by the end of the year," he said.

Because sirens are required within earshot of all residents in the 10-mile radius of Palo Verde, Arizona Public Service must keep a close eye on new homes being built within the emergency zone. The utility plans to add three solar-backed sirens this year.

Acres of desert surrounding Palo Verde makes it one of the least populated nuclear emergency zones in the nation. The utility estimates that 5,800 people live within the emergency zone, but the West Valley's relentless growth is expected to push the area's population to 45,000 in 2040.

Arizona Public Service also depends on alternative ways to notify residents. APS passes out calendars with detailed emergency instructions to zone residents. Also, messages would be broadcast over television and radio. Still, some area residents say it's unnerving to discover that a power outage now could knock out more than two-thirds of the plant's sirens.

Bob Hathaway, who lives within three miles of the plant, says every siren is critical to ensure that residents in the sparsely populated area receive notification.

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http://www.azcentral.com/lavoz/front/articles/052505pat-CR.html.html

Se corre el telón sobre la muerte de Tillman

Por Luis Avila

La Voz

Mayo 25, 2005

Pat Tillman tomó notoriedad en 2002 después de haberse enlistado en el ejército estadunidense para unirse a los esfuerzos de guerra en Afganistán, decisión que tomó después del ataque del 11 de septiembre.

Ahora el padre de Tillman llama al ejército “mentiroso”, ya que cuando su hijo murió se mandó un comunicado en el que se expresaba que Pat Tillman, miembro del grupo Rangers del ejército y parte del regimiento 75, había sido asesinado por fuego enemigo en una emboscada en la frontera con Pakistán.

Pattrick Tillman Sr., padre del ex-jugador de los Cardenales de Arizona y los Sun Devils de la Universidad Estatal de Arizona, expresó que los reportes hechos por el gobierno americano y el ejercito son una farsa, ya que después del funeral, el ejército les confesó que su hijo había sido asesinado por fuego amigo, y no por balas enemigas como habían expresado con anterioridad. publicidad

“Pat tenía altos ideales de su país, y fue por eso que hizo lo que hizo…Los militares lo dejaron abajo, fue un proceder irrespetuoso. El hecho de que el era el máximo jugador de equipo, y que vio a sus propios hombres asesinarlo es absolutamente desgarrador y trágico, y el hecho de que nos mintieron después, es asqueroso”, dijo Mary Tillman en su primera entrevista desde la muerte de su hijo.

El padre de Pat Tillman, un abogado de la ciudad de San José, California, mencionó que estas declaraciones falsas se hicieron con la finalidad de convertir a Pat en un héroe militar, y usarlo así como estandarte en el proceso de reclutamiento de nuevos soldados.

"Después de lo que pasó, toda la gente en posiciones de autoridad se vio creativa para hacer un guión de los hechos”, dijo el padre de Tillman. “Ellos a propósito interfirieron con la investigación, lo cubrieron todo. Yo creo que ellos pensaron que lo podían controlar todo, y que sus esfuerzos de reclutamiento se irían al desastre si la verdad de su muerte salía a la luz”.

Además de dejar atrás más de 3 millones de dólares en su contrato con los Cardenales, Pat dejó a su esposa apenas unas semanas después de su luna de miel, para enlistarse en el ejército.

Pat se convirtió en una figura nacional el año pasado con el anuncio de su muerte, y el número 42 de su casaca que usó con la Universidad Estatal de Arizona, fue retirado el pasado 13 de noviembre, como símbolo de respeto a su valentía.

Según reportes de una investigación extensiva del periódico Washington Post, se encontró que la brigada que mató por accidente a Tillman, quemó su uniforme y armería momentos después del asesinato, para así esconder las pruebas del fuego cruzado.

Varias personas de la ciudad de Phoenix han pedido al equipo de fútbol americano de los Cardenales de Arizona que nombren el nuevo estadio en honor a Tillman, o construyan un lugar para honrar la memoria de este ex-jugador profesional de fútbol, recipiente de la estrella de plata de heroísmo, y ex residente del Valle del Sol.

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got $750??? if so the feds say your a criminal, and is going to seize the money until you can prove your not a criminal if you send the money to anyone by wire.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0528wiretransfers.html

State targets wire transfers

Focus on people-smuggling also snares innocents

Susan Carroll

Republic Tucson Bureau

May. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

A task force that targets human-smuggling organizations by analyzing wire transfers has netted about $4 million since March, hitting traffickers hard during a prime time for illegal border crossings and resulting in at least 55 arrests.

But critics say Arizona's latest anti-smuggling initiative, which uses computer analysis to periodically target all Western Union transactions over $750, also has snared innocent people sending money to family members.

The task force led by the Arizona Attorney General's Office uses a state law that took effect in August to go after proceeds associated with people smuggling, estimated at $320 million annually in Phoenix alone. Since late 2004, the task force has frozen about $10 million in wire transfers. However, it returned an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the money after finding the intended recipients were not smugglers.

The wire-transfer investigations led to trafficking suspects such as Roberto Navarez-Vega, who detectives said picked up $40,000 in smuggling proceeds from Western Union in an 18-month span. Navarez-Vega's cellphone kept ringing during a police interrogation last fall. When he answered, the caller said: "We have a big load. Where do you want us to put these people?" court records show.

But the process is not always so clean. On April 1, Luis Martinez, an engineer whose wife used to work for the Arizona Attorney General's Office, went to a Western Union office in Tucson to pick up $1,000. His wife wired the money from Saipan, where she now works as a prosecutor, so he could pay bills and buy their teenage son medication after dental surgery.

He was told the money was frozen and eventually tracked down a detective.

"They grilled me like I was a criminal," Martinez said. "I was shocked. They assume everybody is guilty and let the chips fall where they may. It's wrong."

How it works

Since 2000, when federal agents reported record-setting arrests of undocumented immigrants along Arizona's stretch of border with Mexico, law enforcement officials looked for new ways to go after smuggling organizations and cut down on related violence in Phoenix, a major distribution hub for traffickers, said Andrea Esquer, an Attorney General's Office spokeswoman.

The office had the power to seize the assets of organized-crime syndicates but not specifically those of human traffickers, she said.

Last year's law gave the task force the ability to seek seizure warrants from judges for wire transfer data. The warrants give investigators a window, typically of less than two months to sift through the tens of thousands of wire transfers that pass through the Western Union's system each hour of each day in search of smuggling money.

The process works by freezing all transactions over $750. Then a detective from the task force, which includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and state Department of Public Safety investigators, contacts the intended recipient, Esquer said. In some cases, the person who went to pick up the money was given a phone number for an investigator to call first. If the person is able to verify his or her identity and prove he or she has a legitimate reason to send the money, the funds are unfrozen within a matter of days, Esquer said.

The money that was intended for smugglers stays frozen and is eventually funneled into a state anti-racketeering fund that pays for the task force's operations, she added.

During the most recent seizure warrant, from March 11 to April 22, investigators initially froze $4.685 million and then released $714,000. The warrant is still sealed in Maricopa County Superior Court, but officials reported making 55 arrests, detaining 143 undocumented immigrants, releasing four people who were held hostage and confiscating weapons, marijuana and cocaine during related investigations.

An earlier search-warrant affidavit from November 2004 offered a glimpse into the illegal business.

Documents identified Navarez-Vega as a smuggling suspect who used Western Union to receive money for years from states including Illinois, Louisiana, Virginia, New York and Wisconsin. According to Western Union records, he picked up at least 100 wire transfers in 2004.

When the task force intercepted a wire transfer in October, Navarez-Vega called to recover the money and was drawn into a police sting that also implicated Rodolfo R. Acedo, another smuggling suspect, according to court records.

Acedo is quoted in court documents as saying that there is "a lot of competition" in the smuggling business and estimating that he transported about 15 undocumented immigrants each week.

"We feel this has been successful," Esquer said. "We've intervened in a number of kidnappings. We've stopped drug smugglers. We've stopped some organizations in human smuggling. So we feel we've at least made a dent into it."

System 'misfired'

But some immigration attorneys have said that the operation is freezing money sent for legitimate purposes, even money that is used to pay the U.S. government bonds for undocumented immigrants.

Chris Stender, a Phoenix immigration attorney, said his legal assistant routinely used Western Union to receive money to post bonds for clients but found that a number of transactions were frozen. In some cases, clients were unable to negotiate the system to get the money back or couldn't afford a lawyer to fight for the funds, several attorneys said.

"They were earmarking large dollar transactions," Stender said. "Certainly, there are legitimate reasons to send those types of funds"

Esquer, of the Attorney General's Office, said that the money is merely detained and that it is not necessary to have a lawyer to get the funds released.

"We liken it to going to the airport and your luggage being searched," she said. "If there's nothing there, you move on your way and you fly to your destination. If the money is legitimate, all we do is detain it, we don't seize it at that time. If the person comes forward and shows us the proper ID, we release it."

But Martinez, the engineer who tried to get the $1,000 sent by his wife, said he got the run-around from Western Union officials and investigators. He called 1-800 number after 1-800 number, he said, and was told at one point that his money was stolen.

Martinez said one Western Union employee said the task force was targeting people with Hispanic last names, a charge Esquer denies.

Martinez said that he finally ended up talking to a detective on the task force but that it still took a day and a half to get the money back.

After Martinez's wife, Marie, involved contacts from when she worked in the Attorney General's Office, the money was freed. The couple received an apologetic e-mail from the Attorney General's Office that said the system "misfired" in their case, he added.

"If my wife hadn't been an attorney, what would we have done to get that money back?" he asked. "I really feel for people who haven't done anything wrong but may not have the money for a lawyer. I just wonder how many people fall through the cracks."

Reach the reporter at susan.carroll@arizonarepublic.com or 1-(520)-207-6007.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0529sting29.html

Tenn. state senator resigns after arrest

FBI sting involves influential Ford, 4 additional people

Rose French

Associated Press

May. 29, 2005 12:00 AM

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - State Sen. John Ford, a member of one of Tennessee's most powerful political families, has resigned after being placed under house arrest, facing charges from a two-year FBI sting, the lieutenant governor said Saturday.

Ford, a Democrat, announced his resignation in a letter Lt. Gov. John Wilder read to the Senate.

"I plan to spend the rest of my time with my family clearing my name," he wrote.

A member of the Senate for more than 30 years, Ford was arrested Thursday after the sting operation nicknamed "Tennessee Waltz." He is charged along with four other current and former state lawmakers with taking payoffs, and he is also accused of threatening to kill a witness.

Prosecutors played a videotape Friday of Ford watching an undercover agent count out $10,000 and an audiotape of him reputedly threatening a potential witness. His lawyer suggested the purported threat was meant as a joke.

For the sting, the FBI set up E-Cycle Management Inc., a sham recycling firm with business cards, a Web site and a chief executive who lobbied lawmakers over wine and finger food.

"This was a major-league effort," said Neil Cohen, a former state prosecutor. "It's not uncommon - it's ongoing all the time all over the country - but there aren't many at this level where there's this much effort and resources and time devoted to one particular sting."

The FBI even went so far as to register E-Cycle as a corporation with the Georgia secretary of state, listing its chief executive officer as "J Carson." E-Cycle had a storefront office in Memphis, not far from the Beale Street entertainment district.

Undercover agents, posing as executives of E-Cycle, offered lawmakers free trips to Florida and wined and dined them at a reception at a Nashville hotel in January.

"I think it's fair to say this type of thing is expensive," said George Bolds, spokesman for the FBI office in Memphis, who said he could not reveal the exact cost of the sting. "It's kind of an extraordinary and sensitive technique used."

Ford's brother is Harold Ford, who served 11 terms in Congress. His nephew is Rep. Harold Ford Jr.

During his tenure in the state Senate, John Ford has lost paternity lawsuits, given a political job to a girlfriend, used campaign money for his daughter's wedding and been successfully sued for sexual harassment.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0529television29.html

Television thief is freed after 35 years in prison

Associated Press

May. 29, 2005 12:00 AM

HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. - After 35 years in prison for stealing a television set, Junior Allen is a free man.

Allen, 65, walked out of prison Friday, ending a case that attracted widespread attention because he remained in jail while other inmates convicted of murder, rape or child molestation were released.

"I'm glad to be out," Allen told supporters outside Orange Correctional Center. "I've done too much time for what I did. I won't be truly happy until I see a sign that says I'm outside of North Carolina."

Allen was a 30-year-old migrant farm worker from Georgia with a criminal history that included burglaries and a violent assault when he sneaked into an unlocked house and stole a 19-inch black-and-white television worth $140.

Some state records say Allen roughed up the 87-year-old woman who lived there, but he was not convicted of assault.

Instead, he was sentenced in 1970 to life in prison for second-degree burglary. The penalty for the offense has since been changed to a maximum of three years in prison.

Enoch Hasberry, programs director at Carteret Correctional Center in Newport, said he worries Allen might not adjust well to life on the outside.

<#==#>

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0529idcards29.html

Plastic Social Security ID touted

Business, privacy, migrant groups critical

Frank James

Chicago Tribune

May. 29, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Congress is moving to replace the paper Social Security cards issued to 280 million Americans with plastic, harder-to-counterfeit versions to try to curtail identity theft and the use of Social Security cards and numbers by some undocumented immigrants to obtain jobs.

Privacy and immigration advocates as well as business groups have concerns about the proposed cards. Critics fear the cards could become de facto national IDs and eventually play the role that identity papers have played over history in repressive societies. There is also worry that the proposal could mean trouble for immigrant workers and even criminal fines for employers.

If the Illegal Immigration Enforcement and Social Security Protection Act of 2005 became law, every person seeking a job in the United States, citizen or undocumented immigrant alike, would have to present the card to a prospective employer. Job applicants would have to provide more than a Social Security number: They would need to physically present the card.

The front of the card as envisioned by its proponents would have the holder's photo and Social Security number.

A machine-readable magnetic stripe on the card's back, like those found on credit cards, would contain a digitized photo as well and the person's employment eligibility.

The card could be swiped through a reader by an employer with its information compared to an employment eligibility database to be maintained by the Homeland Security Department.

The legislation also tries to address the economic demand for undocumented immigrants. Under the bill, for the first time employers who hire such individuals could face federal criminal charges punishable by up to five years in prison for employing even one illegal immigrant while imposing a fine of up to $50,000 for every illegal immigrant hired.

The bill would also require the hiring of 10,000 additional federal immigration enforcement agents to crack down on hiring of illegal immigrants.

With the growing concern on Capitol Hill over identity theft, which is often facilitated by misused Social Security numbers, there is bipartisan interest and momentum in Congress to deal a blow to such crimes. Some lawmakers view the legislation as a possible way to do that.

Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., the bill's chief sponsor, is chairman of the House Rules Committee, which sets the terms for debate on legislation once it is on the House floor.

Dreier argues that his bill could be the solution to the widespread abuse of Social Security numbers.

There are 280 million active Social Security cards, with 5.4 million issued in 2003, the last year for which there are statistics available.

About 1.2 million of those were issued to immigrants legally authorized to work in the United States.

Knowing that Americans might be alarmed to realize that many of them would have to get new cards under his plan, Dreier has sought to reassure them. "This will only be used by people looking for a new job," he said.

Privacy experts worry that the legislation could worsen the nation's burgeoning identity-theft problem.

Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the new card could potentially expand the already widespread use of Social Security numbers as personal identification.

"We don't want people easily counterfeiting Social Security cards or passing around Social Security numbers," he said. "Our concern with the proposal is that this card . . . is the type of card that people might begin to carry in their wallets," a troubling prospect since that would give identity thieves more opportunities to get their hands on lost or stolen cards.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/international/europe/26amnesty.html

U.S. 'Thumbs Its Nose' at Rights, Amnesty Says

By ALAN COWELL

Published: May 26, 2005

LONDON, May 25 - In coordinated broadsides from London and Washington, Amnesty International accused the Bush administration on Wednesday of condoning "atrocious" human rights violations, thereby diminishing its moral authority and setting a global example encouraging abuse by other nations.

The Bagram File

Amnesty International Report 2005 In a string of accusations introducing the organization's annual report in London, Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary general, listed the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the so-called rendition of prisoners to countries known to practice torture as evidence that the United States "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."

Defending its human rights record as "leading the way," the White House dismissed the accusations as ridiculous and unfounded.

Ms. Khan labeled the United States detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, where more than 500 prisoners from about 40 countries are being held, as "the gulag of our times."

In Washington, William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, urged President Bush to press for a full investigation of what he called the "atrocious human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers."

"When the U.S. government calls upon foreign leaders to bring to justice those who commit or authorize human rights violations in their own countries, why should those foreign leaders listen?" Dr. Schulz said. "And if the U.S. government does not abide by the same standards of justice, what shred of moral authority will we retain to pressure other governments to diminish abuses?

"It's far past time for President Bush to prove that he is not covering up the misdeeds of senior officials and political cronies who designed and authorized these nefarious interrogation policies," he said. "So Congress must appoint a truly impartial and independent commission to investigate the masterminds of the atrocious human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, and President Bush should use the power of his office to press Congress to do so."

In response, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said: "I think the allegations are ridiculous, and unsupported by the facts. The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have worked to advance freedom and democracy in the world so that people are governed under a rule of law, that there are protections in place for minority rights, that women's rights are advanced so that women can fully participate in societies where now they cannot."

"We've also - are leading the way when it comes to spreading compassion," Mr. McClellan said. "The United States leads the way when it comes to providing resources to combat the scourge of AIDS." Amnesty's language was among the strongest it has used and represented a sense in human rights groups that the treatment by the United States of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay had diminished its standing.

"It's not because the United States is the worst human rights abuser in the world but because it's the most influential," said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, via phone from New York. "United States disregard for international human rights standards is damaging those standards," he said, referring to some governments with poor human rights records "citing the U.S. record to justify their own."

In a separate telephone interview, Dr. Schulz of Amnesty International USA acknowledged his organization had used "strong language" because it felt that "the United States has betrayed a very fundamental principle that this country stands for."

The focus on what Dr. Schulz called "the failure of global leadership" was a shift from times when Amnesty International concentrated on issues like the death penalty, which it opposes, in countries like China, and the plight of refugees.

Ms. Kahn said the Bush administration had "gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to 'redefine' torture."

"It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding 'ghost detainees' (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the 'rendering' or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practice torture," she said.

She also criticized the European Union and some United Nations institutions, saying the Security Council had "failed to muster the will to take effective action in Darfur" in Sudan.

<#==#>

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/living/11766338.htm

Posted on Sun, May. 29, 2005

Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The New York Times

LONDON — Shut it down. Just shut it down.

I am talking about the war-on-terrorism POW camp at Guantanamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.

If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantanamo has become for America’s standing abroad, don’t read the Arab press. Don’t read the Pakistani press. Don’t read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.

It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, “An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base.” Google the words “Guantanamo Bay and Australia” and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins: “New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims.”

Just another day of the world talking about Guantanamo Bay.

Why care? It’s not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own paper and others that the abuse at Guantanamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that more than 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous.

I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It’s because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets — from the Internet to al-Jazeera.

What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab multimedia explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were JIA — “Jews, Israel and America.” That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen.

I believe the stories emerging from Guantanamo are having a similar toxic effect on us — inflaming sentiments against the United States all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill.

Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me: “When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantanamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: ‘That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.’”

Guantanamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantanamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won’t be able to take advantage of Guantanamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation.

“This is not about being for or against the war,” said Michael Posner, the executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue. “It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace — otherwise it is not going to work.”

Mr. Friedman’s new book is The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.

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http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1307884&secid=1

May 26, 2005

The student most likely to . . .

By SHARI CHANEY THE GAZETTE

Most of this year’s Mesa Ridge High School yearbooks have a thick line of black ink on one of the pages.

It covers up a caption that labeled one student “most likely to assassinate President Bush.”

Widefield School District officials called the incident a prank that wasn’t caught before the book was printed.

Secret Service officials say it’s something they’ll need to look into.

About 100 yearbooks were distributed to Mesa Ridge students May 6, said James Drew, the district’s public information officer. Someone brought the photo caption to the staff’s attention, and students were asked to return the books.

About 70 were returned, Drew said.

During the following weekend, staff members blacked out the caption under the photo with a wide black marker, Drew said. Yearbooks that had not yet been distributed were also edited.

Distribution of the books resumed the next week.

The photo was one of several of seniors with joke cutlines.

One read, “Most likely to forget his gown at graduation.” Another read, “Most likely to hack into the FBI files to see what really happened at Roswell.”

Christina Tredway, who just graduated from Mesa Ridge, said students had been talking about the incident in the final days of the school year, which ended May 19 in the Widefield district.

Many students thought it was ridiculous to black out the caption because everyone knew it was a joke, Tredway said.

“They kind of ruined our yearbook,” she said.

In Tredway’s copy, the offending caption could still be read through the ink.

A staff member who answered the phone at Mesa Ridge High School on Wednesday referred questions to Drew, as did yearbook adviser Matt Weege when he was reached at home.

The district did not release the names of the staff or students involved.

Drew said a procedure has been established to triple-check future yearbooks before printing.

District officials checked with legal counsel and were told they did not need to file a police report because the photo caption was clearly a prank, Drew said.

But Lon Garner, special agent in charge of the Denver Secret Service District, said the incident will be looked into because all threats against the president must be investigated.

“That’s our mission,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0394 or

schaney@gazette.com

http://www.theindychannel.com/education/4540841/detail.html

H.S. Yearbook Publishes Assassination 'Joke'

'Most Likely To Assassinate Bush' Caption Draws Scrutiny

POSTED: 2:48 pm EST May 26, 2005

UPDATED: 1:58 pm EST May 27, 2005

WIDEFIELD, Colo. -- Most Mesa Ridge High School students in Widefield, Colo., got yearbooks with a black mark under one student's picture, covering up a phrase that has caught the Secret Service's interest.

After about 100 yearbooks were distributed earlier this month, somebody complained about the caption, which read "Most likely to assassinate President Bush." Another entry read, "Most likely to hack into the FBI files to see what really happened at Roswell."

School officials asked students to return the yearbooks, and about 70 were returned. Staff members used black markers to cover up the words in those and the still-undistributed books.

"They kind of ruined our yearbook," said Christina Tredway, who just graduated from the school.

Widefield School District officials said it was a prank that wasn't caught before the yearbooks were printed.

The district did not release the names of the staff or students involved.

District spokesman James Drew said future yearbooks will be triple-checked before printing.

Mesa Ridge High School has about 1,300 students.

Lon Garner, special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Denver District, said all threats against the president must be investigated.

"That's our mission," he said. "That's what we do."

Widefield is a suburb of Colorado Springs, Colo.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-briefs28.4may28,1,194548.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

Yearbook Joke Not So Funny to Secret Service

From Times Wire Reports

High school yearbooks were recalled in Widefield so that administrators could black out a joke caption under one student's picture: "Most likely to assassinate President Bush."

Mesa Ridge High School officials had staffers use ink markers to obscure the words, but not before the Secret Service launched an investigation. "That's our mission," said special agent Lon Garner. "That's what we do."

School officials called the caption a prank that wasn't caught before the yearbooks were printed, and district spokesman James Drew said future yearbooks will be triple-checked before printing.

"They kind of ruined our yearbook," said graduate Christina Tredway.

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hey laro:

remember how you told me it costs you something like 26 stinking cents a minute to call your family from the government revenue program in your prison.

i was at the post office the other day and those bastards sell phone card for $10 and the rate is 10 cents a minute. if you buy a card for $20 the rate goes down to 6.6 cents a minute.

people that are jailing you are really bastards. the same government goons that charge you 26 cents a minute for a phone call will charge anyone on the street 6.6 cents a minute for a phone call.

time for the revolution

later

<#==#>

kevin:

laro sent me a copy of the form he fills out to order stuff. man it is a real rip off. in addition to making slave out of you guys they also shake you down for as much revenue as possible. i plan to scan it and put it on one of my web pages.

could you send me one of the forms that you fill out when you order stuff from sheriff joes gulag?

thanks

<#==#>

this friday we had a anti-police protest to protest the cops that torture and kill people with tasers. it was rather small. but fun.

we gots some good photos at the phoenix police stations. in front of the police station are some signs that specificly say "NO PARKING FOR POLICE CARS" of course there where two cop cars illegally parked there so we got some photos of it.

<#==#>

opps.........

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=AZPHG&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2005-05-30-14-22-57

May 30, 5:21 PM EDT

U.S. forces mistakenly detain Sunni chief

By PAUL GARWOOD

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military nearly set off a sectarian crisis Monday by mistakenly arresting the leader of Iraq's top Sunni Muslim political party, while two suicide bombers killed about 30 police, and U.S. fighter jets destroyed insurgent strongholds near Syria's border.

Northeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi military aircraft crashed Monday during a mission with four American troops and one Iraqi on board, the U.S. military said. It was not immediately clear what their condition was or even what kind of aircraft it was.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, Sgt. Kate Neuman, said the four Americans were military personnel.

And on Memorial Day, the U.S. military said American soldier Spc. Phillip Sayles, of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, was killed in an attack Saturday in the northern city of Mosul. As of Monday, at least 1,657 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The arrest of Iraqi Islamic Party leader Mohsen Abdul-Halim, his three sons and four guards did little to help efforts to entice Iraq's once-dominant Sunni community back into the political fold. The Sunnis lost their influence following Saddam Hussein's ouster two years ago.

Many believe the Sunni fall from grace, and parallel rise to power of Iraq's majority Shiite population, is spurring the raging insurgency, driving many disenchanted Sunnis to launch attacks that have killed more than 760 people since the April 28 announcement of the Shiite-dominated new government. Bringing Sunnis back into the political fold could soothe some tensions.

In a commitment to end the violence, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari vowed that "Operation Lightning," the large-scale campaign that began Sunday, would rid Baghdad of militants and, in particular, suicide car bombers, the deadliest and regular weapon of choice for insurgents.

"We needed to clean up some of our problem districts and that's why Operation Lightning was launched ... to quickly come to the protection of civilians and stop the bloodshed," al-Jaafari said at a news conference.

But renewed carnage south of the capital showed the difficulty of his job.

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the mayor's office in Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad. The attackers waded into a crowd of 500 policemen staging an early-morning protest of a government decision to disband their special forces unit.

Staggering the detonations by one minute and 100 yards apart to maximize the casualties, the bombers killed at least 27 policemen and wounded 118 in an attack that scattered body parts, blood and shards of glass across a wide area, said police Capt. Muthana Khalid Ali.

The Polish military, which controls the area, said about 30 Iraqis were killed. The conflicting tolls were apparently linked to the difficulty in trying to count the dead because of all the body parts strewn around the blast site.

"I just saw a ball of fire and flying pieces of flesh. After that, confused policemen started firing into the air," he said.

In an apparent claim of responsibility, al-Qaida in Iraq said in an Internet statement that one of its members carried out an attack "against a group of special Iraqi forces." The statement's authenticity could not be verified.

Militants regard Iraqi security forces as prime targets in their campaign against the U.S. military, which hinges its eventual exit from Iraq on the ability of local soldiers and police to handle the insurgency.

Violence across northern Iraq killed at least nine others, with gunmen slaying a senior Kurdish official in Kirkuk and a Sunni tribal leader in Mosul, a roadside bomb killing a civilian in Baqouba and Iraqi soldiers shooting to death six insurgents in Mosul and northern Anbar province.

U.S. warplanes and helicopters attacked insurgents near Husaybah, on the Syrian border, west of Baghdad, the military said.

"There were enemy casualties, but due to the destruction of the buildings from which they were firing, we are unable to determine the number of enemy fighters killed and wounded," military spokeswoman Lt. Blanca Binstock said.

U.S. forces have launched several offensives in western Iraq aimed at rooting out Sunni extremists crisscrossing the desert frontier with Syria to smuggle in foreign fighters and weapons.

Fears of sectarian violence have whipped across Iraq amid the latest violence, which has seen Shiite and Sunni clerics kidnapped, tortured and shot.

In recent weeks, Shiite and Sunni leaders have met to try to settle their differences, with both camps declaring their intent to work to end the violence.

But Monday's roughly 12-hour detention of Abdul-Hamid flared tensions yet again, causing Sunni leaders to condemn his arrest and accuse American authorities of trying to alienate their community.

Few details were available on why the Americans arrested the Sunni leader, but it appeared to be related to the ongoing Sunni-led insurgency and fears of a broader sectarian conflict starting up.

The U.S. military acknowledged it had made a "mistake" by detaining Abdul-Hamid.

"Following the interview, it was determined that he was detained by mistake and should be released," the military said. "Coalition forces regret any inconvenience and acknowledge (Abdul-Hamid's) cooperation in resolving this matter."

Iraqi authorities suggested someone had planted "lies" against him in a bid to stir up "sectarian sedition."

Abdul-Hamid himself said U.S. forces questioned him about the "current situation," an apparent reference to the wave of attacks.

Following his release, Abdul-Hamid told reporters how "U.S. special forces" blew open the doors to his home "and dragged (his sons and guards) outside like sheep."

"They forced me to lay on the ground along with my sons and guards and one of the soldiers put his foot on my neck for 20 minutes," he told Al-Jazeera TV.

Soldiers later put him into a helicopter and flew him to an unknown location for more questioning, he said. He said he did not know the whereabouts of his sons and guards.

"At the time when the Americans say they are keen on real Sunni participation, they are now arresting the head of the only Sunni party that calls for a peaceful solution and have participated in the political process," said Iraqi Islamic Party Secretary-General Ayad al-Samarei.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, expressed "surprise and discontent" over the arrest.

"This way of dealing with such a distinguished political figure is unacceptable," he said.

The country's largest Shiite political party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, condemned the arrest and demanded U.S. forces "be more accurate and not take action against political figures without legal justification."

The influential Association of Muslim Scholars and Sunni Endowment charity group, which have merged with Abdul-Hamid's party to form a powerful bloc to protect Sunni political interests, also condemned the arrests.

Abdul-Hamid's party had in recent weeks taken steps to become more involved in the political process after boycotting the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, which were dominated by parties drawn from Iraq's majority Shiite population.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0530ruelas30.html

Sheriff faults car for his accident

May. 30, 2005 12:00 AM

Sheriff Joe Arpaio insists this is not interesting.

That the citizens of Arizona won't care to read about how he totaled his county-issued car at a Fountain Hills drugstore.

How he says the car lurched forward uncontrollably, ramming over a curb and a giant boulder before mercifully coming to rest inches from a busy street.

Arpaio was not injured in the wreck.

But he was shaken up a bit. Especially in the confidence he had in his Crown Victoria, which he alternatively referred to as "stupid," "garbage" and a "lemon."

A diagram of the wreck shows the sheriff jumped the curb at the end of a parking space, heading straight into a plant and climbing over a boulder. That impact blew out the front tires and broke the drive shaft.

The car came to rest on the sidewalk of Palisades Boulevard, one of the main streets through the town of Fountain Hills.

A simple explanation would be that Arpaio hit the gas instead of the brake. But he bristled at that suggestion.

"Nooo, naaaah," the sheriff said, shaking his head vigorously before I could even finish asking him the question.

We were in the parking lot of another shopping center, this time for a news conference on safe driving. "I'm a big supporter of traffic safety," Arpaio told reporters.

The campaign was needed, the 72-year-old sheriff said, because students were getting out of school and "young people, sometimes they have a problem behind the wheel."

Arpaio insists he did not have any problems behind the wheel.

He says his wreck was caused by something mechanical.

"I've had problems with that car," he said about the 2001 model that sustained $7,227.21 worth of damage, mainly to its undercarriage and wheel support. "I was never happy with that car."

The normally media-friendly Sheriff's Office kept quiet about the April 2 accident.

His office also was hesitant to release the report after I filed a public-records request. Lt. Paul Chagolla, a department spokesman, questioned why I wanted the report and dismissively told me it was on a "list of priorities."

When the Sheriff's Office did give up the report, it also included several pages of repair records, seeking to bolster Arpaio's claim that the car had mechanical failures.

Highlighted sections of work orders show the car, over the past year, had its transmission rebuilt, leaking fuel gaskets replaced and brake pads and rotors changed out.

But nothing would explain what Arpaio described: a car that suddenly zoomed forward unstoppably.

"It lurched and I couldn't stop it and I just kept going," Arpaio said.

That's what he told his deputy who investigated the accident, which occurred about 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday.

A log of radio traffic shows the state Department of Public Safety showed up at the scene, but the Sheriff's Office kept the investigation.

"Mr. Arpaio said he had pulled into the parking lot of the Osco Drug store and was going to park his vehicle in a space on the north side of the parking lot when his vehicle would not stop subsequently striking the curb and stopping in the landscaping," the report says.

The car was towed to Five Star Ford for repairs. A notation on the repair log asks the mechanic to check for "throttle sticking," meaning whether the accelerator cable was frayed or whether something was making the car act as if the gas pedal were being pressed.

A notation from the mechanic says that portion of the car showed no problems.

Mark Salem, a Tempe mechanic who hosts a weekend radio show on KTAR-AM, laughed when I read him those notations.

I initially told Salem everything about the incident except the driver's name. Salem has worked as a mechanical expert for insurance companies for the past 15 years.

He said he has done about 25 cases of "mysterious acceleration" and none has a mechanical reason.

"The inescapable conclusion is that these definitely involve the driver inadvertently pressing the accelerator instead of, or in addition to, the brake pedal," he said, adopting the well-polished manner he uses in court testimony.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conducted a study of "sudden acceleration" accidents that reached the same conclusion.

That theory is further bolstered in Arpaio's wreck by a mechanic's notation that the "over rev limiter" was activated.

That system, Salem said, starts shutting down the car, cylinder by cylinder, if the engine is turning dangerously fast. It also means, "the foot was to the floor."

Still, Arpaio is sticking to his story. He didn't make a mistake. It was the car's fault.

"Maybe I should have gotten a new car (before this happened)," he said. "What do you do? Give up the car? Give it to someone else? Make it their problem? No, I'm not going to do that."

In the parking lot, after the safe-driving news conference, he pointed out the 2002 Crown Victoria he's driving now.

He said this is a much better car.

"I'm a straight shooter," he said, before he got in his car and drove downtown. "You've got to appreciate that."

Yes, but just to be safe, as he pulled out of the parking space I was off to the side.

Reach Ruelas at (602) 444-8473 or richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com.

<#==#>

Ex-cons' hurdles: Find job, home

Gary Fields

Wall Street Journal

May. 30, 2005 12:00 AM

In the kitchen of an Applebee's restaurant in Queens, N.Y., Jacqueline Smith has been a model hire. In less than two years working as a cook, she got a promotion to supervisor, doubled her salary and won the award for employee of the year.

Her success hasn't come easily. The dark-haired 38-year-old is an ex-convict who served more than nine years for transporting more than half a pound of crack cocaine from New York to Washington. Since being released in July 2003, she has struggled with basic necessities such as finding affordable housing and getting a valid state ID card.

A single parent with a steady but low-paying job, Smith would normally be considered a prime candidate for public-housing assistance, but she knows the odds are against her. Local housing rules bar ex-felons from living in public housing for six years after completing their sentence. So every night around midnight, Smith takes a few buses and switches subway lines for an hour-long trek to a Manhattan shelter for female ex-convicts where she and her daughter have been living for more than a year. advertisement

"It's one battle after the next - trying to obtain housing, trying to obtain employment," Smith says. "I want a second chance. I want people to see I made mistakes, but I am making it right."

Smith is one of more than 630,000 people released each year from corrections institutions in the U.S. Not surprisingly, people who have been locked up for many years, often poorly educated and lacking in financial support, face a range of obstacles to re-entering society. Yet some of the biggest are put there by federal, state and local governments, including hurdles to getting student loans, public housing and other forms of government assistance.

Paying the price

For years, the thinking among law-enforcement officials and politicians was that this was the price people should pay for breaking the law. Now there is an emerging belief that the larger price is being borne by society, since the practical barriers facing ex-prisoners make it more likely that they will slip back into a life of crime.

Two-thirds of ex-felons return to police custody within three years of their release for new crimes or for probation or parole violations, according to Justice Department studies. U.S. taxpayers spent $60 billion on corrections in 2002 at the local, state and federal levels, up from $9 billion two decades earlier. Over that same time frame, corrections has been the second fastest growing government spending category after health care.

Aside from public-housing restrictions, many former felons find they need special waivers to get licensed in vocations they learned while serving time. Some find their attempts to get an education are stymied by laws barring loans to those convicted of a crime. Still others can stumble into technical violations that send them back to prison, such as reporting late for a meeting with a probation officer. For those who have completed lengthy sentences, the most frustrating barrier is also the most basic - getting a legitimate ID card, such as a driver's license.

"One barrier may not be that big a deal," says Debbie Mukamal, director of the prisoner re-entry institute at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Usually, though, offenders face several barriers, she says, adding: "You can't get housing, you have child support" payments to make, "you can't get ID and no one will hire you. Cumulatively, that sends a signal: You're not wanted." Mukamal is the co-author of a sweeping report last year funded by the Justice Department and conducted by the Legal Action Center, a New York non-profit, examining "roadblocks to entry" facing ex-offenders.

After years of pushing for tougher sentences, politicians in Washington are rethinking their approach. The Second Chance Act, hammered out by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and introduced last month, would provide more than $80 million in grants for programs to help ex-offenders re-enter society.

Training in prison

Kellie Mann Owens might have benefited from a key part of the legislation: a provision ensuring that ex-offenders can be licensed in occupations they trained for in prison.

Owens was determined to learn a skill so she could land a job when she left the Alderson, W.Va., women's prison made famous recently for housing Martha Stewart. In 1993, Owens, who had just finished her sophomore year at Santa Rosa Junior College in northern California, obtained LSD for her ex-boyfriend and mailed it to him in Georgia. He was caught and cooperated with authorities against those he had enlisted to secure drugs, including Owens. He was sentenced to two years while she received 10.

Owens, now 34 years old, joined the prison's all-women firefighting team, a group that provides fire protection for the prison and backup for other local fire squads. She figured it would position her well for a decent job. For more than five years, she slogged through classes and training, entering smoke-filled rooms with her oxygen mask blackened to simulate rescue situations and navigating the Appalachian mountain roads near the prison in a yellow fire truck.

"Any of the physical requirements that you had to do" for state licensing, "we were required to do in our classes," says Owens.

She eventually rose to the fire team's top rank of lieutenant, garnering 300 hours of training and 100 hours at the scenes of actual fires in the towns outside the prison.

In January 2001, President Clinton granted her clemency on his last day in office after receiving her name from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that advocates changes in sentencing laws.

After eight years in prison, she left Alderson for her parents' home in Alpharetta, Ga., confident a fire department in one of Atlanta's booming suburbs would hire her. She filled out each job application noting she was a felon. But state law bars hiring former felons.

Owens says she offered to "clean hoses, flush the truck," anything to get her foot in the door - to no avail.

Eventually, she got a job with an organization that trains service dogs for people with debilitating diseases and injuries. Last year, she moved to Hawaii and started a catering business with her husband. The business didn't take off so they are planning to try again in Mississippi.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0530ex-cons30.html

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tips on id thief???? this guy was busted when he picked up financial aid checks for 3 people at mesa community college.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0530loanfraud30.html

ID thief tells colleges his tricks to get loans

Kristen A. Lee

New York Times

May. 30, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - One of the Education Department's latest weapons against student loan fraud is a former identity thief who assumed more than 50 aliases to collect about $316,000 in federal student grants and loans over 3 1/2 years.

The man, John E. Christensen, 64, now in prison in Arizona, shared the details of his scam in an interview required as part of his plea agreement. The Education Department has distributed the interview on DVD to colleges and universities as part of an effort by the agency's inspector general and federal student aid offices to combat such loan fraud.

The U.S. Education Department disburses about $65 billion in student financial aid annually. The process of applying for and obtaining student loans, once done entirely on paper, is now 90 percent Web-based. But while computers have made the loan process faster and more efficient, they have also provided new opportunities for people who want to cheat the system.

"It's becoming easier and easier all the time because everything is done on computer," Christensen said in the interview. "You never have to see anybody."

Christensen stole the identities of inmates in the Arizona prison system, whom he contacted under the guise of helping them with their court cases. Through correspondence, he gleaned enough personal information to enroll in classes and apply for student loans using the inmates' identities.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0530evplayguns30.html

In Chandler, toy guns now legal in public

Edythe Jensen

The Arizona Republic

May. 30, 2005 12:00 AM

CHANDLER - People who carry toy guns that look real won't be breaking the law here anymore.

The City Council rewrote a municipal weapons ordinance that used to make it a misdemeanor to carry a loaded air gun, BB gun or paint-ball gun in a public place even though it is legal to carry real guns under state law.

The council made it legal to carry the less-lethal weapons but not fire them or display them in a threatening manner on public property. It's still legal to use them on private property.

The law came under fire from parents who said the toys aren't dangerous and the restrictions were too harsh.

But school and police officials said they are concerned about the real-gun appearance of toys and the potential for injury from plastic projectiles.

David Layman, 50, said he has been complaining for months about the city's ban on carrying toy guns. He said the new wording is a step in the right direction but violations should be civil matters, not criminal offenses punishable by up to six months in jail and up to a $2,500 fine.

Layman's 16-year-old son is scheduled to appear in municipal court soon to defend himself on criminal charges related to his use of an AirSoft gun.

Police helped draft the changes. Officers are most concerned with the use of toy guns that look real, said Chandler police spokesman Mark Franzen.

"It's not a good thing to take those toy guns and point them at someone who can misjudge them as real weapons," he said. "Somebody could get hurt."

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i think it is time for you guys to convert to that religion that demands you eat porterhouse steaks every night. :) although i my case i would modify the scared scriptures to say porterhouse steaks soaked in a hot, hot chili sause

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0601scotus01.html

Court sides with inmates in prison religion case

Gina Holland

Associated Press

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Three Ohio prisoners and others sued under a 2000 federal law, claiming they were denied access to religious literature and ceremonial items and denied time to worship.

The law says states that receive federal money must accommodate prisoners' religious beliefs, with such things as special haircuts or meals, unless wardens can show that the government has a compelling reason not to.

The court's unanimous ruling addressed a narrow issue: whether the law as written is an unconstitutional government promotion of religion. It is not, justices decided, leaving the door open to future legal challenges on other grounds.

"Religion plays a vital role in rehabilitation," said Derek Gaubatz, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious-liberty law firm that represents inmates.

Many states have contested the law on grounds that inmate requests could make it harder to manage prisons, and the court seemed concerned.

The law "does not elevate accommodation of religious observances over an institution's need to maintain order and safety," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in announcing the decision.

Ginsburg said judges who handle inmate cases should give deference to prison administrators.

"I think this was a net win for the prisons," said Marci Hamilton, a church-state scholar at Cardoza School of Law.

Douglas Cole, Ohio's solicitor, said that the ruling could inspire more inmate demands. However, he said, "we're encouraged that the court recognized that these inmate religious practices can pose significant safety concerns for prison administrators."

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isnt bush the guy who also says we are killing them to bring them freedom over in iraq and afghanistan. and the same guy who has installed puppet governments in iraq and afghanistan to bring them democracy???

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0601bush01.html

Bush says Amnesty report contains 'absurd' charges

Mark Silva

Chicago Tribune

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Making a forceful defense of America's handling of terrorism detainees, President Bush on Tuesday dismissed as "an absurd allegation" the claim of a human rights group that the United States is operating a network of gulag-style prisons.

Bush rejected Amnesty International's contention in its recent annual report of human rights abuses worldwide and suggested instead that allegations about U.S. mistreatment of detainees are coming from the detainees themselves, calling them "people who hate America."

"The United States is a country that ... promotes freedom around the world," Bush said at a news conference, issuing a vehement rejection of the comparison of U.S. camps with the infamous gulags of the former Soviet Union.

"When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way," he said. "It's just an absurd allegation."

The president's news conference, his fifth such solo appearance before the news media in the first five months of his second term, comes amid widening criticism of U.S. handling of combatants in the war on terror and other suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at American military bases and prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Human rights advocates rejected Bush's attack on their methods.

"In the face of all this evidence, to try to dismiss this with a wave of the hand is really to fail in one's public duty," Bill Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in response to Bush's comments.

The president's stepped-up schedule of televised appearances also comes as his job approval is slipping in recent opinion polls.

Yet the president expressed unbending optimism that his troubled second-term agenda eventually will succeed.

"I don't worry about anything here in Washington, D.C," Bush said.

"I mean, I feel comfortable in my role as the president, and my role as the president is to push for reform. The American people appreciate a president who sees a problem and is willing to put it on the table."

At the same time, he accused Senate Democrats of "another stall tactic" in the delayed confirmation vote on John Bolton, Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid voiced willingness to work on the president's energy bill and other goals but attempted to turn the blame on Republicans for the rifts plaguing Congress.

Bush saved his testiest objections for Amnesty International's attack on the Guantanamo operation and other detention camps.

Bush said that "it seemed like to me (Amnesty International) based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations, by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to dissemble. That means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report."

Amnesty International's Schulz replied: "Amnesty always looks for patterns of behavior. We never take the word of one or two people, and when we receive independent reports from dozens of people or their families or their representatives ... when all of this fits a pattern, then Amnesty believes it can reach some reasonable conclusions."

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0601terror-gitmo01.html

Prisoners say they were sold for bounties

Men who fled Afghan testify

Michelle Faul

Associated Press

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave the Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because U.S. allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan himself to help supply and win over warlords to fight for U.S. Special Forces.

"It wouldn't surprise me if we paid rewards," said Schroen, who retired after 32 years in the CIA soon after the fall of Kabul in late 2001. He recently published the book First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan.

Schroen said Afghan warlords such as Gen. Rashid Dostum were among those who received bundles of notes. "It may be that we were giving rewards to people like Dostum because his guys were capturing a lot of Taliban and al-Qaida," he said.

Pakistan has handed hundreds of suspects to the Americans, but Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told the AP, "No one has taken any money."

The U.S. departments of Defense, Justice and State and the Central Intelligence Agency also said they were unaware of bounty payments being made for random prisoners.

The U.S. Rewards for Justice program pays only for information that leads to the capture of suspected terrorists identified by name, said Steve Pike, a State Department spokesman. Some $57 million has been paid under the program, according to its Web site.

It offers rewards up to $25 million for information leading to the capture of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But a wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture.

Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.

One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country's intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the United States.

"When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn't pay them, they'd make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I'd definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/national/31planes.html?

C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights

By SCOTT SHANE, STEPHEN GREY and MARGOT WILLIAMS

Published: May 31, 2005

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane.

SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

Secret Fleet

Flight PlansWhen the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.

Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.

"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."

Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.

Inquiries From Abroad

The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.'s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.

Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.

Secret Fleet

Flight PlansThe episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.

Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities. "We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.

A Varied Fleet

But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency's aviation wing.

The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.

Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.

But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.

"To tell you the truth, I don't know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.

Son of Air America

Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.

Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.

"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.

Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.

"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.

Secret Fleet

Flight PlansWhile flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

Ferrying Terrorism Suspects

Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.

He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them 'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.

Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.

Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.

When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.

Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.

Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.

A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.

Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.

Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.

The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.

Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.

Mysterious Companies

As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry.

Secret Fleet

Flight PlansSo, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.

On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.

No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.

Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others."

He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.

Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.

Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it."

Secrecy Is Difficult

Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.

When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.

In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."

He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0601deputyindict01.html

Deputy accused of sex abuse

Emily Bittner

The Arizona Republic

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

A Maricopa County sheriff's deputy has been indicted on three counts of sexual abuse involving an underage girl.

Deputy John Frank Springfield, 35, who was assigned to the Canyon Lake Patrol, was put on administrative leave in December. Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the incident occurred in Springfield's patrol car while he was on duty and in uniform.

"He violated the public trust," Arpaio said. "He's going to have to pay for it."

Arpaio said the incident occurred last July when Springfield, an 8-year veteran, encountered a 15-year-old Utah girl at Canyon Lake.

The girl was with a church group and wanted to play a prank, Arpaio said.

"She suggested he put her in handcuffs and bring her back to the church group," said Lisa Allen MacPherson, a Sheriff's Office spokeswoman.

At some point, the deputy touched the girl's breasts and genitals, the indictment says.

The girl's brother is also a deputy with the Sheriff's Office, and she told him about the situation, Arpaio said. She brought her allegations against Springfield to authorities in November.

Springfield learned of the investigation two weeks later, Arpaio said.

Arpaio said detectives are investigating allegations that Springfield abused a 16-year-old girl, but no charges have been filed in that case.

Springfield, who is married with children, was indicted Friday and served with court papers Tuesday. All three of the allegations are felonies. Springfield was unavailable for comment.

Arpaio said there may be more victims and they are encouraged to call his office at (602) 876-1011.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0601fraud-border01.html

Border Patrol investigation over kickbacks is criticized

Susan Carroll

Republic Tucson Bureau

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

TUCSON - The U.S. Office of Special Counsel on Tuesday criticized the U.S. Border Patrol's investigations into allegations that agents in Arizona ran an extensive kickback scheme, calling a series of inquiries "deficient."

The Border Patrol's investigations stemmed from whistle-blower complaints that agents temporarily stationed in the border city of Douglas submitted doctored receipts for reimbursement or made kickback deals with landlords from January 2000 to April 2002. Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., estimated in 2003 that the fraud, investigated by the Office of Inspector General, cost taxpayers "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

But years after the allegations first surfaced, the Border Patrol had not taken any disciplinary action, according to the OSC, an independent agency created to protect whistle-blowers. Internal investigations by the Border Patrol found no evidence of a cover-up or criminal wrongdoing.

The OSC asked for an inquiry by then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who released a report in March 2004 citing 45 instances of proposed disciplinary action. It was unclear Tuesday what action was taken or how many agents were involved. Border Patrol officials did not return phone calls late Tuesday.

The OSC criticized the Homeland Security investigation for not addressing allegations by whistle-blowers that the Border Patrol knew about the scheme and failed to act.

"Owning to the sheer numbers involved, it stretches credulity that 45 employees at a single Border Patrol station engaged in a kickback and fraud scheme for a number of years and warranting severe discipline without the knowledge of the management," the OSC said in the statement.

Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch called for a more thorough investigation and forwarded a report Tuesday to Congress and President Bush.

In the statement, Bloch warned that "there is a real risk of creating the appearance of a whitewash" by not more thoroughly investigating supervisors.

The report by the Office of Inspector General found that some agents in southeastern Arizona took advantage of daily stipends paid by the federal government.

For example, an agent temporarily assigned to Tucson from San Diego could be reimbursed up to $55 a night for lodging. The agents would pay $35 a night and get a receipt for $55, investigators said.

Reach the reporter at susan.carroll@arizonarepublic.com or 1-(520)-207-6007.

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hello iraq, goodbye vietnam

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0601iraq-insurgency01.html

U.S. Army says it's lacking troops to hold key ground

Tom Lasseter

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

TAL AFAR, Iraq - U.S. Army officers in the badland deserts of northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border, say they don't have enough troops to hold the ground they take from insurgents in this transit point for weapons, money and foreign fighters.

From last October to the end of April, there were about 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the northwestern region, which covers about 10,000 square miles.

"Resources are everything in combat. ... There's no way 400 people can cover that much ground," said Maj. John Wilwerding of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is responsible for the northwestern tract that includes Tal Afar.

"Because there weren't enough troops on the ground to do what you needed to do, the (insurgency) was able to get a toehold." said Wilwerding, 37, of Chaska, Minn.

During the past two months, Army commanders, trying to pacify the area, have had to move in about 4,000 Iraqi soldiers; about 2,000 more are on the way.

About 3,500 troops from the 3rd regiment took control of the area this month, but officers said they were still understaffed for the mission.

"There's simply not enough forces here," said a high-ranking U.S. Army officer with knowledge of the 3rd regiment.

"There are not enough to do anything right; everybody's got their finger in a dike."

The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concern that he'd be reprimanded for questioning U.S. military policy in Iraq.

The Army has no difficulty in launching large-scale operations to catch fighters in "an insurgent Easter egg hunt," the officer said. "But when we're done, what comes next?"

Control of the area is seen as key to stemming the insurgency in the rest of Iraq.

More than 650 Iraqis have been killed since the nation's interim government took office April 28.

May also turned out to be the deadliest month since November for U.S. troops in Iraq, with 65 reported killed by insurgents, according to figures tabulated by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a group that tracks coalition troop deaths from Department of Defense releases.

"This town is kind of like a staging point for the rest of the country," said Capt. Geoff Mangus, 25, of Milledgeville, Ga., an Army intelligence officer in Tal Afar.

"They know that weapons and foreign fighters can filter through here unscathed."

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My gosh how horrible. Slaves where used to build the U.S. Capitol! most people dont know it but slavery is still legal and used extensively today. the 13th amendment specificlly allows the government to use slavery as a punishment for crimes - "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, ..."

Sheriff joe uses slaves extensivelly in his chain gangs in his gulag in maricopa county jail, the arizona state prison forces slaves to make license plates and other things, and the federal government forces prisoners to work as slaves in the federal prisons.

of course they dont call them slaves, and often they even pay them a token wage of a 5 cents or so and hour.

and some of these slaves such as ray krone were convicted of crimes they didnt commit.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0601capitol01.html

Slaves' work on building U.S. Capitol under study

Associated Press

Jun. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Capitol was built with the labor of slaves who cut the logs, laid the stones and baked the bricks. Two centuries later, Congress has decided the world should know about this.

Congressional leaders on Tuesday announced the creation of a task force to study the history of slave labor in the construction of the Capitol and suggest how it can best be commemorated.

"It is our hope that the work of the task force will shed light on this part of our history, the building of our nation's greatest symbol of democracy," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid said in a joint statement.

Historians say slaves were the largest labor pool when Congress in 1790 decided to create a new national capital along the Potomac surrounded by the two slave-owning states of Maryland and Virginia.

Over the next decade, farmers rented their slaves for an average of $55 a year to help build the Capitol, White House, Treasury Department and streets laid out by city planner Pierre L'Enfant.

Slaves cut trees on the hill where the Capitol would stand, cleared stumps from the new streets, worked in the stone quarries where sandstone was cut and assisted the masons laying stone for the walls of the new homes of Congress and the president.

They also were involved in the expansion of the Capitol in the late 1850s.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., a task force member, said lawmakers became aware of the use of slaves after researchers in the late 1990s found documents of Treasury Department payments to slave owners. She said there apparently were more than 400 slaves hired out.

The recognition push began with legislation in 2000.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0601DeepThroat01-ON.html

Ex-FBI official: I was 'Deep Throat'

Associated Press

Jun. 1, 2005 08:35 AM

WASHINGTON - Watergate whistleblower Deep Throat played a central role in one of the biggest White House scandals ever, helping bring down a president and inspire a political mystery so famous his nickname earned an entry in Webster's. Thirty years later, the source is secret no more.

At age 91, after decades of hiding his role as The Washington Post's tipster from politicians, the public and even his family, former FBI official W. Mark Felt told his secret to a lawyer his family had consulted on whether Felt should come forward.

The attorney, John O'Connor, wrote a Vanity Fair magazine article revealing Felt's disclosure, and within hours of the story's release Tuesday, Felt's family and the Post confirmed it.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," Vanity Fair quoted Felt, the former No. 2 man at the FBI, as saying.

"It's the last secret" of the story, said Ben Bradlee, the paper's top editor at the time the riveting political drama played out three decades ago.

Felt lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., and is said to be in poor mental and physical health because of a stroke. His family did not immediately make him available for comment, asking the news media horde gathered outside his home to respect his privacy "in view of his age and health."

"The family believes that my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice," Felt's grandson, Nick Jones, said, reading a family statement. "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well."

Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said in a statement: "W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

For many, Felt's admission answers one of the biggest questions in American politics and journalism: Who was the source so fearful he'd be found out by the Nixon White House that he insisted on secret signals rather than phone calls to arrange meetings with the Post reporters, a man portrayed as a cigarette-smoking bundle of nerves by Hal Holbrook in the 1970s movie "All the President's Men"?

"A good secret deserves a decent burial and this one is going to get a state funeral," said Leonard Garment, acting special counsel to President Nixon after the Watergate story broke and author of the book "In Search of Deep Throat."

Felt "had the credentials, he had the knowledge, he had a series of motives, he probably was very unhappy with the way the investigation was going," Garment said.

For some, it raises new questions.

"I never thought he was in the loop to have the information," John Dean, counsel in Nixon's White House and the government's top informant in the Watergate investigation, told The Associated Press. "How in the world could Felt have done it alone?"

Dean said he couldn't see how Felt, then in charge of the FBI's day-to-day operations, could have had time to rendezvous with reporters in parking garages and leave clandestine messages to arrange meetings. Perhaps FBI agents helped him, Dean suggested.

The scandal that brought Nixon's resignation began with a burglary and attempted tapping of phones in Democratic Party offices at the Watergate office building in Washington during Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. It went on to include disclosures of covert Nixon administration spying on and retaliating against a host of perceived enemies. But the most devastating disclosure was the president's own role in trying to cover-up his administration's involvement.

Among other things, Deep Throat urged Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money trail - from the financing of burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee offices to the financing of Nixon's re-election campaign.

The resulting campaign finance scandal led Congress to overhaul the nation's campaign finance rules, ordering federal candidates and national party committees to disclose their donors' identities and observe new contribution limits.

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee had kept the identity of Deep Throat secret at his request, saying his name would be revealed upon his death. But then Felt revealed it himself, a move that startled Woodward and the Post, the newspaper reported.

Also surprised was Nixon chief counsel Charles Colson, who worked closely with Felt in the Nixon administration and served prison time in the Watergate scandal.

"He had the trust of America's leaders and to think that he betrayed that trust is hard for me to fathom," Colson told the AP.

Even the existence of Deep Throat, nicknamed for an X-rated movie of the early 1970s, was kept secret for a time. Woodward and Bernstein revealed their reporting had been aided by a Nixon administration source in their best-selling book "All the President's Men." Felt's name doesn't appear there.

A hit movie was made of the book in 1976 starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It portrayed cloak-and-dagger methods employed by Woodward and Deep Throat. When Woodward wanted a meeting, he would position an empty flowerpot containing a red flag on his apartment balcony. When Deep Throat wanted to meet, the hands of a clock would appear written inside Woodward's New York Times.

The identity of the source had sparked endless speculation over the past three decades. Dean, Nixon chief of staff Alexander Haig, White House press aide Diane Sawyer, speechwriter Pat Buchanan and Garment were among those mentioned as possibilities.

Felt also had been mentioned, but he regularly denied it. His motive for tipping off Woodward and Bernstein remains unknown, but the Post suggested in a story Tuesday night that anger over Nixon's decision to pass him over for FBI director after the death of J. Edgar Hoover could have been a factor.

Felt had expressed reservations in the past about revealing his identity, and about whether his actions were appropriate for an FBI man, his grandson said. His family members thought otherwise. His daughter, Joan, argued that he could "make enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the children's education."

On Wednesday, the question of whether Felt was more hero or more turncoat had the current White House hoping to keep its distance. President Bush, said spokesman Scott McClellan, was interested in the story only as "a great mystery."

"There's going to be plenty of analysis on this and we'll leave it to others to do all the analysis of it," McClellan said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked during a Pentagon news conference whether Felt should be viewed as a hero or villain, said, "I'm not in any judgmental mood. ... I think that any time any wrongdoing occurs, I think it's important that wrongdoing be reported."

Woodward and Bernstein were the first reporters to link the Nixon White House and the Watergate break-in.

Nixon, facing almost-certain impeachment for helping to cover up the break-in, resigned in August 1974. Forty government officials and members of Nixon's re-election committee were convicted on felony charges.

Felt was convicted in 1980 for authorizing illegal break-ins in the 1970s at homes of people associated with the radical Weather Underground. He was pardoned by President Reagan in 1981.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

The Sunday Times - Britain

May 01, 2005

The secret Downing Street memo

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft

Date: 23 July 2002

S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

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dont the cops have something better to do???

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0603nebriefs03.html

Police report chasing man who wore lingerie

SCOTTSDALE - A man who was reportedly found hiding near a Scottsdale gym wearing women's lingerie was arrested, but he didn't go quietly.

Police say David Mario Cumba, 33, was found about 7 p.m. Tuesday in bushes near a Maximum Fitness in the 8500 block of East Anderson Drive.

The man drove away in his car when he realized police were approaching, said Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark. He almost struck a patrol vehicle as he fled, Clark said.

He then ran onto a nearby golf course, where police attempted to arrest him. He resisted arrest and was bitten by a police dog, Clark said.

Cumba was treated for injuries at a hospital and booked on unspecified charges, police said.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0604terror-rights04.html

Amnesty defends assailing of the U.S.

Rights group used 'gulag' deliberately

Lizette Alvarez

New York Times

Jun. 4, 2005 12:00 AM

LONDON - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the choice of the term gulag in its annual report to describe the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration.

Kate Gilmore, Amnesty's executive deputy secretary-general, said the administration's response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses.

The report, released April 26, placed the United States at the heart of its list of human rights offenders, citing indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and secret transfers of prisoners to countries that practice torture. But it is the use of the word gulag, a reference to the complex of labor camps where Stalin sent thousands of dissidents, that has drawn the most attention.

President Bush called the report "absurd" several times, and said it was the product of people who "hate America."

Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN that he was "offended" by the use of the term and did not take the organization "seriously."

And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the comparison "reprehensible."

Amnesty has fired right back, pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" William Schultz, executive director of the group's U.S. branch, wrote in a letter to the editor to be published today in the New York Times.

In a telephone interview Friday, Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantanamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison.

While the substance of the report was defended by human rights organizations and others, several said Amnesty International had erred in using the word gulag, if only because it allowed the Bush administration to change the conversation.

"I think it was a rather serious misjudgment to use the term gulag," said Nigel Rodley, a University of Essex law professor and chairman of the Human Rights Center there. "The basic criticism of some of the problems are very real and it has given the administration the opportunity to divert from the substance of the concern."

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hey laro:

two questions for your friend marc hoy.

1) is he a goddamned atheist like us???? from the one letter i got from him he sounded like he had a problem with god. i dont have a problem with god. i just dont beleive he exists. if the dude really wanted me to worship him he would slap me a few times in the face and tell me he is real.

2) what kind of name is "hoy"? at phoenix college their football field is named "hoy field". and "hoy" in spanish means today.

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