Yemen’s government conceals America drone murders
How dare they accuse the American government of murdering innocent civilians. All the woman and children killed has brown skin so they must have been terrorist criminals - Well that's probably how President Obama feels.
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When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen’s government tries to conceal it
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Published: December 24
Dhamar, Yemen — A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.
Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.
Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.
The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its Soviet-era jets had carried out the Sept. 2 attack. But tribal leaders and Yemeni officials would later say that it was an American assault and that all the victims were civilians who lived in a village near Radda, in central Yemen. U.S. officials last week acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike.
“Their bodies were burning,” recalled Sultan Ahmed Mohammed, 27, who was riding on the hood of the truck and flew headfirst into a sandy expanse. “How could this happen? None of us were al-Qaeda.”
More than three months later, the incident offers a window into the Yemeni government’s efforts to conceal Washington’s mistakes and the unintended consequences of civilian deaths in American air assaults. In this case, the deaths have bolstered the popularity of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s Yemen affiliate, which has tried to stage attacks on U.S. soil several times.
Furious tribesmen tried to take the bodies to the gates of the presidential residence, forcing the government into the rare position of withdrawing its assertion that militants had been killed. The apparent target, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders said, was a senior regional al-Qaeda leader, Abdelrauf al-
Dahab, who was thought to be in a car traveling on the same road.
U.S. airstrikes have killed numerous civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world, and those governments have spoken against the attacks. But in Yemen, the weak government has often tried to hide civilian casualties from the public, fearing repercussions in a nation where hostility toward U.S. policies is widespread. It continues to insist in local media reports that its own aging jets attacked the truck.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has kept silent publicly, neither confirming nor denying any involvement, a standard practice with most U.S. airstrikes in its clandestine counterterrorism fight in this strategic Middle Eastern country.
In response to questions, U.S. officials in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was a Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing warplane, that fired on the truck. The Pentagon declined to comment on the incident, as did senior U.S. officials in Yemen and senior counterterrorism officials in Washington.
Since the attack, militants in the tribal areas surrounding Radda have gained more recruits and supporters in their war against the Yemeni government and its key backer, the United States. The two survivors and relatives of six victims, interviewed separately and speaking to a Western journalist about the incident for the first time, expressed willingness to support or even fight alongside AQAP, as the al-Qaeda group is known.
“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” Mohammed said. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”
Public outrage is also growing as calls for accountability, transparency and compensation go unanswered amid allegations by human rights activists and lawmakers that the government is trying to cover up the attack to protect its relationship with Washington. Even senior Yemeni officials said they fear that the backlash could undermine their authority.
“If we are ignored and neglected, I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages,” said Nasser Mabkhoot Mohammed al-Sabooly, the truck’s driver, 45, who suffered burns and bruises. “I would fight along al-Qaeda’s side against whoever was behind this attack.”
One airstrike among dozens
After Osama bin Laden’s death last year, Yemen emerged as a key battlefield in the Obama administration’s war on Islamist militancy. AQAP members are among those on a clandestine “kill list” created by the administration to hunt down terrorism suspects. It is a lethal campaign, mostly fueled by unmanned drones, but it also includes fixed-wing aircraft and cruise missiles fired from the sea.
This year, there have been at least 38 U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, according to the Long War Journal, a nonprofit Web site that tracks American drone attacks. That is significantly more than in any year since 2009, when President Obama is thought to have ordered the first drone strike.
The Radda attack was one of the deadliest since a U.S. cruise missile strike in December 2009 killed dozens of civilians, including women and children, in the mountainous region of al-
Majala in southern Yemen. After that attack, many tribesmen in that area became radicalized and joined AQAP.
“The people are against the indiscriminate use of the drones,” said Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi. “They want better management of drones. And, more important, they want to have some transparency as far as what’s going on — from everybody.”
The concern over civilian casualties has grown louder since the spring, when the White House broadened its definition of militants who can be targeted in Yemen to include those who may not be well-known.
“We don’t attack in populated areas,” said an Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing the U.S. airstrikes here. “We don’t go after people in dwellings where we don’t know who everyone is. We work very hard to minimize the collateral damage.
“Having said all that, like any programs managed and operated by human beings, mistakes happen. We are not perfect.”
The rise in U.S. attacks came as AQAP and other extremists seized large swaths of southern Yemen last year, taking advantage of the political chaos of the country’s populist Arab Spring revolution. Before that, AQAP orchestrated failed attempts to send parcel bombs on cargo planes to Chicago in 2010 and to bomb a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner the previous year.
In January, AQAP-linked militants briefly seized Radda, placing them only 100 miles south of the capital, Sanaa. But they left after the government, agreeing to their demands, released several extremists from prison. By the summer, the radicals had also been pushed from towns in southern Yemen after a U.S.-backed military offensive initiated by President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took office early this year after the country’s autocratic leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, stepped down after 33 years in power.
But today, extremists linked to al-Qaeda are still in and around Radda, as well as in other parts of Yemen, staging attacks on government and military officials.
In recent months, villagers in Sabool, about 10 miles from Radda, said they have heard U.S. drones fly over the area as many as three or four times a day. Some described them as “little white planes.”
“It burns my blood every time I see or hear the airplanes,” said Ali Ali Ahmed Mukhbil, 40, a farmer. “All they have accomplished is destruction and fear among the people.”
On that September morning, his brother Masood stepped into the Toyota truck in Sabool. It was filled with villagers heading to Radda to sell khat, a leafy narcotic chewed by most Yemeni males. After they sold their produce, they headed back in the afternoon.
Nasser Ahmed Abdurabu Rubaih, a 26-year-old khat farmer, was working in the valley when he heard the explosions. He ran to the site and, like others, threw sand into the burning vehicle to douse the flames. As he sifted through the charred bodies on the road, he recognized his brother, Abdullah, from his clothes.
“I lost my mind,” Rubaih recalled.
Mukhbil’s brother Masood also was dead.
‘Trying to kill the case’
Some witnesses said that they saw three planes in the sky, two black and one white, and that the black ones were Yemeni jets. But both missiles struck the moving vehicle directly, and the terrain surrounding the truck was not scorched — hallmarks of a precision strike from a sophisticated American aircraft.
“If you say it wasn’t a U.S. drone, nobody will believe you,” said Abdel-Karim al-Iryani, a former Yemeni prime minister who is a senior adviser to Hadi. “A Yemeni pilot to be able to hit a specific vehicle that’s moving? Impossible.”
The Yemeni government publicly apologized for the attack and sent 101 guns to tribal leaders in the area as a symbolic gesture, which in Yemeni culture is an admission of guilt. But a government inquiry into the strike appears to be stalled, human rights activists and lawmakers said.
For the past three months, lawmakers have unsuccessfully demanded that senior government officials reveal who was responsible for the attack. Yemen’s defense and interior ministries, Hadi’s office, and the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Washington played a crucial role in ousting Saleh and installing Hadi, a former defense minister. The United States also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the military and security forces in counterterrorism assistance. U.S. officials regard Hadi as an even stauncher counterterrorism ally than Saleh.
“The government is trying to kill the case,” said Abdul Rahman Berman, the executive director of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, or HOOD, a local human rights group. “The government wants to protect its relations with the U.S.”
After the 2009 strike in al-
Majala, the Yemeni government took responsibility for the assault. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was then the head of U.S. Central Command, according to a U.S. Embassy e-mail leaked by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks.
Three weeks after the Radda attack, Hadi visited Washington and praised the accuracy of U.S. drone strikes in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, as well as publicly. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
‘That’s why we are fighting’
The day after the attack, tribesmen affiliated with al-
Qaeda blocked the roads around Radda and stormed government buildings. They set up a large tent and held a gathering to denounce the government and the United States. Fliers handed out around town read: “See what the government has done? That’s why we are fighting. . . . They are the agents of America and the enemy of Islam. . . . They fight whoever says ‘Allah is my God,’ according to America’s instructions.”
At the funeral, some mourners chanted “America is a killer,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, a human rights activist who attended.
A few days later, at a gathering, relatives of the victims urged Yemeni officials to be careful about the intelligence they provided to the Americans. “Do not rush to kill innocent people,” declared Mohammed Mukhbil al-Sabooly, a village elder, in testimony that was videotaped. “If such attacks continue, they will make us completely lose our trust in the existence of a state.”
On extremist Web sites and Facebook pages, grisly pictures of the attack’s aftermath, with bodies tossed like rag dolls on the road, have been posted, coupled with condemnations of the government and the United States. In Sabool and Radda, youths have vowed to join al-Qaeda to fight the United States.
“The drone war is failing,” Berman said. “If the Americans kill 10, al-Qaeda will recruit 100.”
AQAP sent emissaries to Sabool to offer compensation to the victims’ relatives, seeking to fill the void left by the government, which has provided no compensation to the survivors and the families of those killed. Some relatives have joined AQAP since the attack, said Hamoud Mohamed al-Ammari, the security chief of Radda.
Others are considering.
“If there’s no compensation from the government, we will accept the compensation from al-Qaeda,” Rubaih said. “If I am sure the Americans are the ones who killed my brother, I will join al-Qaeda and fight against America.”
Greg Miller in Washington and Ali Almujahed in Sanaa, Yemen, contributed to this report.
Too many government secrets
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Too many government secrets
By Editorial Board, Published: December 25
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT keeps petabytes (that’s a million gigabytes each) of information secret every year — some of it highly sensitive, some of it hardly. A 1972 diplomatic telegram that discusses the exchange of gifts between the United States and China — musk oxen from the Nixon administration in return for two Chinese pandas — was labeled confidential, and it wasn’t declassified until 1997.
Americans have a right to know what the government is doing on their behalf or in their name, except in exceptional circumstances. A functioning democracy requires the people to hold their government to account. Accountability, in turn, requires knowledge about government activities. It also requires access to information about what the government has done in the past, and how that worked or didn’t. A complex and cautious system can even harm national security, keeping information from people within and outside government who could help make sense of it.
But America’s classification system “keeps too many secrets, and keeps them too long.” That’s the conclusion of the Public Interest Declassification Board, a presidential task force, in a new report. Most of that classification, it notes, “occurs by rote.”
How big is the problem? Former national security officials have said that half or even most of the country’s classified documents need not be. Records that are 25 years old are supposed to be reviewed and declassified. There are enough 25-year-old records in storage to produce a backlog of 400 million pages. But with the proliferation of electronic communication over the past couple of decades, government classifiers are now cordoning off much more. The backlog, the board reckons, is set to grow exponentially.
Unfortunately, the board reports, those doing the classifying have little interest in shaking things up. They face few incentives to release information and many incentives to be overly cautious. No one is ever punished for classifying too many records, and no one wants to get in trouble for releasing sensitive material.
At the very least, government employees should not be scared of retribution. The board recommends offering “safe harbor” to those who, in good faith, decide to classify material at a lower level or not at all. Classification training should emphasize the importance of releasing information whenever possible. Records that still must be classified should be assessed for their value to the public and prioritized for eventual declassification review. Others that need to be classified for only a very short time might be scheduled for quick, automatic declassification. The process of declassifying what is already in the queue, meanwhile, must be streamlined by changing rules and technology.
Since the executive branch has control over most of the procedure, the White House should take the problem of over-classification seriously and convene a steering committee immediately to implement some of the board’s sensible suggestions. Even if that means some of America’s critical musk-oxen secrets slip out a little earlier.
The secret CIA police - Global Response Staff or GRS
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CIA’s Global Response Staff emerging from shadows after incidents in Libya and Pakistan
By Greg Miller and Julie Tate, Published: December 26
The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.
The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.
But a series of deadly scrapes over the past four years has illuminated the GRS’s expanding role, as well as its emerging status as one of the CIA’s most dangerous assignments.
Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan.
GRS contractors have also been involved in shootouts in which only foreign nationals were killed, including one that triggered a diplomatic crisis. While working for the CIA, Raymond Davis was jailed for weeks in Pakistan last year after killing two men in what he said was an armed robbery attempt in Lahore.
The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years. Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones.
CIA veterans said that GRS teams have become a critical component of conventional espionage, providing protection for case officers whose counterterrorism assignments carry a level of risk that rarely accompanied the cloak-and-dagger encounters of the Cold War.
Spywork used to require slipping solo through cities in Eastern Europe. Now, “clandestine human intelligence involves showing up in a Land Cruiser with some [former] Deltas or SEALs, picking up an asset and then dumping him back there when you are through,” said a former CIA officer who worked closely with the security group overseas.
Bodyguard details have become so essential to espionage that the CIA has overhauled its training program at the Farm — its case officer academy in southern Virginia — to teach spies the basics of working with GRS teams.
The security apparatus relies heavily on contractors who are drawn by relatively high pay and flexible schedules that give them several months off each year. In turn, they agree to high-risk assignments in places such as Benghazi and are largely left on their own to take basic precautions, such as finding health and life insurance.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the GRS has about 125 employees working abroad at any given time, with at least that many rotating through cycles of training and off-time in the United States.
At least half are contractors, who often earn $140,000 or more a year and typically serve 90- or 120-day assignments abroad. Full-time GRS staff officers — those who are permanent CIA employees — earn slightly less but collect benefits and are typically put in supervisory roles.
The work is lucrative enough that recruiting is done largely by word of mouth, said one former U.S. intelligence official. Candidates tend to be members of U.S. Special Forces units who have recently retired, or veterans of police department SWAT teams.
Most GRS recruits arrive with skills in handling the weapons they will carry, including Glock handguns and M4 rifles. But they undergo additional training so they do not call attention to the presence or movements of the CIA officers they are in position to protect.
Although the agency created the GRS to protect officers in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been expanded to protect secret drone bases as well as CIA facilities and officers in locations including Yemen, Lebanon and Djibouti.
In some cases, elite GRS units provide security for personnel from other agencies, including National Security Agency teams deploying sensors or eavesdropping equipment in conflict zones, a former special operator said. The most skilled security operators are informally known as “scorpions.”
“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants and provide an “envelope” of security, the former official said, all while knowing that “if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”
The consequences in such cases can be severe. Former CIA officials who worked with the GRS still wince at the fallout from Davis’s inability to avoid capture as well as his decision to open fire in the middle of a busy street in Pakistan. The former security contractor, who did not respond to requests for comment, said he was doing basic “area familiarization” work, meaning learning his surroundings and possibly mapping routes of escape, when he was confronted by two Pakistanis traveling by motorcycle.
Davis became trapped at the scene, and his arrest provoked a diplomatic standoff between two tense allies in the fight against terrorism.
The CIA took heavy criticism for the clumsiness of the Davis episode, temporarily suspending the drone campaign in Pakistan before U.S. payments to the families of the men Davis had killed helped secure his release.
By contrast, the CIA and its security units were praised — albeit indirectly — in a report released last week that was otherwise sharply critical of the State Department security failures that contributed to the deaths of four Americans in Libya three months ago.
In Benghazi, a GRS team rushed to a burning State Department compound in an attempt to rescue U.S. diplomats, then evacuated survivors to a nearby CIA site that also came under attack. Two GRS contractors who had taken positions on the roof of the site were killed by mortar strikes.
Among those killed was Glen Doherty, a GRS contractor on his second CIA assignment in Libya who had served in about 10 other places, including Mexico City, according to his sister, Kathleen Quigley.
“Was he aware of the risks? Absolutely,” Quigley said in an interview, although she noted that “he wasn’t there to protect an embassy. He was there to recover RPGs,” meaning he was providing security for CIA teams tracking Libyan stockpiles of rocket-propelled grenades.
Doherty took the CIA job for the pay and abundant time off, as well as the chance to continue serving the U.S. government abroad, Quigley said.
When Doherty died, he left debts that included loans on two houses in California, Quigley said. He had no life insurance. CIA officials told Doherty’s family that they had recommended companies willing to underwrite such policies, but that agency coverage was not available for contractors.
Quigley did not criticize the agency, but added: “It’s so sad for a guy like that to go out and have nothing to show for it, except, frankly, a lot of debt.”
The CIA declined to comment.
Quigley said her family has started a foundation in Doherty’s name to help other families of current and former U.S. Special Operations troops who have been killed. A separate organization performs a similar function for families of slain CIA officers.
The CIA Memorial Foundation pays college costs for children of CIA officers who were killed and recently began providing payments of about $5,000 to families to help pay for funeral-related costs.
The organization is paying tuition and other costs for 28 dependents of slain agency employees, and an additional 77 will be eligible when they reach college age, said Jerry Komisar, a CIA veteran who is president of the foundation.
The organization’s obligations have grown in recent months, a stretch that ranks as among the deadliest for the CIA since the attack on Khost. After Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed in Benghazi, three other CIA officers — all staff employees — were killed in Afghanistan.
The foundation covers contractors who work for the GRS. “I often wonder why people take those kinds of risks,” Komisar said. “It’s got to be an opportunity for them to bring in more cash. But the downside is, you put yourself at great risk. My heart goes out to them.”
Listing of New York Gun owners from the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.
This is one reason you shouldn't be required to register anything with the government.
While I think most people are smart enough not to use this information to lynch gun owners I suspect it does happen in other areas.
In Arizona "sex offenders" are required to register with the government and their addresses are public information that the government puts on the web so that anybody can views.
The term "sex offender" sounds really bad, but in Arizona and many other states the definition of a "sex offender" is so broad it includes a person who was arrested for taking a leak in an alley. That's something almost all of us are guilty of.
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N.Y. news site stirs outrage after publishing gun owners' names
December 26, 2012, 3:51 p.m.
In the annals of the gun debate, both the act and the outrage that followed are familiar: On Saturday, the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of thousands of handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties.
Click on a dot and zoom in: You'll get a name and an address of everybody who owns a handgun permit, which the paper obtained through a public records request.
The story soon dominated the Internet. Through Wednesday, it was still drawing outrage from online commentators as well as from conservative political interests such as Breitbart.com, which saw a media outlet targeting law-abiding gun owners' privacy -- and safety -- after a polarizing tragedy in Newtown, Conn.
“I am outraged by this as you have put me, my family, friends and others at risk," wrote Keisha Sutton on the newspaper's Facebook page. "My family and friends consist of law enforcement officers and 'licensed' handgun owners.”
Others argued that publishing such personal information would drive gun owners to the black market.
CynDee Royle, the newspaper's editor and vice president/news, was not surprised at the reaction.
"We knew publication of the database would be controversial," she said, "but we felt sharing as much information as we could about gun ownership in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.”
Al Tompkins, a faculty member at the nonprofit Poynter Institute for journalism, criticized the database, saying in an email published on Poynter.org: "Publishing gun owners’ names makes them targets for theft or public ridicule."
But that may not happen, according to a study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologythat examined the aftermath of a similar gun-ownership data dump by a newspaper.
In 2008, the Commercial Appeal in Memphis published a searchable database of concealed-carry handgun permit owners in Tennessee that included names and ZIP codes of gun owners (but not addresses). A similar furor followed. "What they've done is give criminals a lighted pathway to [burglarize] the homes of gun owners," Chris Cox, now the top lobbyist for the National Rifle Assn., told the paper at the time.
But that concern turned out to be wrong, according to the 2010 study by Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Catherine Tucker, a professor at MIT, titled "Guns, Privacy and Crime."
Using the information published by the Commercial Appeal, they found burglaries in 2009 declined 18% in the city's ZIP codes with the most concealed-carry permits and generally increased in ZIP codes with the fewest.
The researchers found no difference for violent crimes, such as assault, that often lack premeditation.
The study also suggested that, following publication of the Memphis database, burglary risk instead shifted to areas with fewer gun registrations. In fact, the study noted that the "results suggest that, despite activism on the part of gun owners against the publication of such databases, it may actually be gun permit holders who benefi ted" from publication.
In an email, Acquisti said that, to his knowledge, the study was the first to examine how publicizing the location of guns affected crime rates.
He called the issue “extremely complex” and cautioned about making generalizations from one study. Even though he didn’t find evidence that publishing gun owners’ general locations put owners in danger, he said a “lack of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Acquisti said it was an “open question” whether increasingly precise location data, like that published on the Journal News' website, would affect burglar behavior.
The findings don't clear up a different NRA talking point -- that as its top strategist Cox had put it, "The essence of right-to-carry is that in a world where wolves cannot distinguish between lions and lambs, the whole flock is safer." In other words, instead of claiming gun privacy as a means of protection for those who choose to carry, the lions-and-lambs argument holds that gun privacy protects the general public, including those who don't own a gun.
"Frequently, in this debate, personal privacy is contrasted to collective security," the study's authors wrote. "However, there are situations where the opposite may happen: criminals may use personal data to choose which potential victims to avoid. Our results bear witness to the nuances of this debate."
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Map of handgun owners published in New York newspaper
By Eileen AJ Connelly
Associated Press
Posted: 12/27/2012 08:08:07 AM PST
NEW YORK -- A newspaper's publication of the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two New York counties has sparked online discussions -- and a healthy dose of outrage.
The Journal News, a Gannett Co. newspaper covering three counties in the Hudson Valley north of New York City and operating the website lohud.com, posted a story Sunday detailing a public-records request it filed to obtain the information.
The 1,800-word story headlined, "The gun owner next door: What you don't know about the weapons in your neighborhood," said the information was sought after the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., about 50 miles northeast of the paper's headquarters in White Plains. A gunman killed his mother, drove to an elementary school and massacred 20 first-graders and six adults, then shot himself. All the weapons used were legally owned by his mother.
The Journal News story includes comments from both sides of the gun-rights debate and presents the data as answering concerns of those who would like to know whether there are guns in their neighborhood. It reports that about 44,000 people in Westchester, Putnam and Rockland counties are licensed to own a handgun and that rifles and shotguns can be purchased without a permit.
It was accompanied online by maps of the results for Westchester and Rockland counties; similar details had not yet been provided by Putnam County. A reader clicking on
the maps can see the name and address of each pistol or revolver permit holder. Accompanying text states that inclusion does not necessarily mean that an individual owns a weapon, just who obtained a license.
By Wednesday afternoon, the maps had been shared about 30,000 times on Facebook and other social media.
Most online comments have criticized the publication of the data, and many suggest it puts the permit holders in danger because criminals have a guide to places they can steal guns. Others maintain it tells criminals who does not have a gun and may be easier to victimize, or where to find law enforcement figures against whom they might hold a grudge.
Some responded by publicizing the home addresses and phone numbers of the reporter who wrote the piece, along with other journalists at the paper and even senior executives of Gannett. Many echoed the idea that publicizing gun permit holders' names is tantamount to accusing them of doing something wrong, comparing the move to publishing lists of registered sex offenders.
The Journal News is standing behind the project. It said in the story that it published a similar list in 2006.
"Frequently, the work of journalists is not popular. One of our roles is to report publicly available information on timely issues, even when unpopular," Janet Hasson, president and publisher of The Journal News Media Group, said in an emailed statement. "We knew publication of the database (as well as the accompanying article providing context) would be controversial, but we felt sharing information about gun permits in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings."
Roy Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, said publishing the data was "too indiscriminate."
He, too, compared the maps to similar efforts involving sex-offender registries or lists of those arrested for driving under the influence, noting that such a move is usually done to indicate a serious problem that requires a neighbor or parent to maintain vigilance.
"You get the connotation that somehow there's something essentially wrong with this behavior," he said of the gun permit database.
"My predisposition is to support the journalism," Clark said. "I want to be persuaded that this story or this practice has some higher social purpose, but I can't find it."
Also common among the comments on the lohud.com were suggestions about suing the paper for violating permit-holders' privacy rights. Such a move would likely be unsuccessful.
"The media has no liability for publishing public information," said Edward Rudofsky, a First Amendment attorney at Zane and Rudofsky in New York. The issue does present a clash between First and Second amendment rights, he said, but in general, the law protects publishing public information unless the intent was to harm someone.
Here is a link to the article with the map of gun owners in it:
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Here is a link to the
article
in the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.
Arizona National Guard Crimes Covered Up
According to this