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The Arizona National Guard has more than 9,100 personnel. Nearly 5,200 belong to the Army Guard, 2,477 are in the Air Guard and 1,460 are civilians. Most are part-time service members who have weekend duty or training. The full-time military staffing totals 2,376.
Experts: Arizona National Guard reform hard even with Brewer's support
by Dennis Wagner - Oct. 15, 2012 11:39 PM
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Guard at a glance
The Arizona National Guard has more than 9,100 personnel. Nearly 5,200 belong to the Army Guard, 2,477 are in the Air Guard and 1,460 are civilians. Most are part-time service members who have weekend duty or training. The full-time military staffing totals 2,376.
The National Guard system, which evolved from colonial militias, is 375 years old. Nationwide, the Guard is budgeted for 464,900 members: 358,200 in the Army National Guard, and 106,700 in the Air Guard.
Soldiers and airmen deploy on U.S. combat missions as needed, assist in disaster response and serve their respective states in crime-fighting, border security and other roles.
State Guards are headed by the governor (commander in chief) who appoints an adjutant general as the top military officer. When called to serve federally, however, Guard members report through Pentagon channels, ultimately to the president.
General Ahmadzai - “We’re not concerned about getting enough young men, just as long as we get that $4.1 billion a year from NATO.”
From the article it doesn't sound like the American government is running it's occupation of Afghanistan any more efficiently then we ran the occupation of Iraq or Vietnam.
Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: October 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — The first thing Col. Akbar Stanikzai does when he interviews recruits for the Afghan National Army is take their cellphones.
He checks to see if the ringtones are Taliban campaign tunes, if the screen savers show the white Taliban flag on a black background, or if the phone memory includes any insurgent beheading videos.
Often enough they flunk that first test, but that hardly means they will not qualify to join their country’s manpower-hungry military. Now at its biggest size yet, 195,000 soldiers, the Afghan Army is so plagued with desertions and low re-enlistment rates that it has to replace a third of its entire force every year, officials say.
The attrition strikes at the core of America’s exit strategy in Afghanistan: to build an Afghan National Army that can take over the war and allow the United States and NATO forces to withdraw by the end of 2014. The urgency of that deadline has only grown as the pace of the troop pullout has become an issue in the American presidential campaign.
The Afghan deserters complain of corruption among their officers, poor food and equipment, indifferent medical care, Taliban intimidation of their families and, probably most troublingly, a lack of belief in the army’s ability to fight the insurgents after the American military withdraws.
On top of that, recruits now undergo tougher vetting because of concerns that enemy infiltration of the Afghan military is contributing to a wave of attacks on international forces.
Colonel Stanikzai, a senior official at the army’s National Recruiting Center, is on the front line of that effort; in the six months through September, he and his team of 17 interviewers have rejected 962 applicants, he said.
“There are drug traffickers who want to use our units for their business, enemy infiltrators who want to raise problems, jailbirds who can’t find any other job,” he said. During the same period, however, 30,000 applicants were approved.
“Recruitment, it’s like a machine,” he said. “If you stopped, it would collapse.”
Despite the challenges, so far the Afghan recruiting process is not only on track, but actually ahead of schedule. Afghanistan’s army reached its full authorized strength in June, three months early, though there are still no units that American trainers consider able to operate entirely without NATO assistance.
According to Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the deputy spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, the Army’s desertion rate is now 7 to 10 percent. Despite substantial pay increases for soldiers who agree to re-enlist, only about 75 percent do, he said. (Recruits commit to three years of service.)
Put another way, a third of the Afghan Army perpetually consists of first-year recruits fresh off a 10- to 12-week training course. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of men with military training are put at loose ends each year, albeit without their army weapons, in a country rife with militants who are always looking for help.
“Fortunately there are a lot of people who want a job with the army, and we’ve always managed to meet the goal set by the Ministry of Defense for us,” said Gen. Abrahim Ahmadzai, the deputy commander of the National Recruiting Center. The country’s 34 provincial recruitment centers have a combined quota of 5,000 new recruits a month.
“We’re not concerned about getting enough young men,” General Ahmadzai said, “just as long as we get that $4.1 billion a year from NATO.”
That is the amount pledged by the United States and its allies to continue paying to cover the expenses of the Afghan military.
In terms of soldiers’ pay, that underwrites $260 a month for the lowest ranks, which in Afghanistan is above-average pay for unskilled labor. A soldier who re-enlists would get a 23 percent raise, to at least $320 a month, more if he had been promoted.
But even as pay rates have risen, so has attrition, which two years ago was 26 percent. The trend is troubling — especially the desertions — as Afghan forces have shouldered an increasing share of the fighting.
American officials have tried to persuade the Afghans to criminalize desertion in an effort to reduce it; instead, Afghan officials have proposed a four-year effort to order the recall of 22,000 deserters, according to General Ahmadzai.
Meanwhile, Afghan deserters live so openly that they list their status as a job reference.
Ghubar, 27, who is from Parwan Province but lives in Kabul, deserted from his battalion with the First Brigade in Kabul just six months into his three-year commitment. Citing his military training, he promptly got a job as a security guard.
Ghubar declined to give more than his first name, but was not worried about being photographed. “There is no accountability,” he said. “If they had any accountability, it wouldn’t be such a bad army.”
Most of his complaints were echoed by the 10 other deserters interviewed on the record for this article.
“I wanted to serve my country, my homeland,” Ghubar said. “But after I joined, I saw the situation was all about corruption. The officers are too busy stealing the money to defeat the insurgents.”
A typical swindle described by the deserters was the diversion of the money allocated to commanders to pay for food, which is usually procured locally rather than distributed from a central depot. “Half the time we would get rice with a bone in it, with a little fat, no meat,” he said.
Ghubar added, “People who join the army, they just lose their hope.”
Ajmal, 24, from Kabul, who also gave only his first name and deserted from the same battalion, said he knew of commanders who had signed up their sons as “ghosts,” enabling them to collect army pay while attending university full time.
Muhammad Fazal Kochai, 28, who deserted from the First Brigade of the 201st Corps a year ago but still proudly shows the army ID card he carries in his wallet, had a particularly rough time. During his year in the army, 25 of his comrades were wounded and 15 killed out of his company of 100 to 150 men, stationed in the dangerous Tangi Wardak area of Wardak Province.
Still, he said, he would have stayed had it not been for the corruption of his officers: “Everybody is trying to make money to line their pockets and build their houses before the Americans leave.”
The final straw came when local villagers pointed him out after his unit had killed a local Taliban commander. “I started to get phone calls from the Taliban saying, ‘We know who you are, and we’re going to kill you.’ ”
He deserted and called to tell the Taliban they did not have to worry about him any longer.
Now Mr. Kochai is convinced the Afghan Army will lose once the Americans leave.
“The army can do nothing on their own without the equipment and supplies of the Americans, without the air support, nothing,” he said.
Sher Agha, 25, from the Sarkano District of eastern Kunar Province, had a similar experience. “Unknown gunmen kept bothering my family and telling them to force me to quit my job and come back home,” he said. Finally, he did.
Most of the deserters either had been wounded or knew someone who had, and they had high marks for the American military’s medical evacuation ability, but complained of poor care and neglect once they were transferred to the Afghan system.
“When I was wounded, the Americans were there in 10 minutes and choppered me out of Khost,” Ajmal said. “Then I went to an Afghan military hospital and no one asked about me. My unit even had me listed as dead.” Someone from his unit did, however, come to retrieve valuable pieces of equipment like his body armor and ammunition belt. He deserted after the hospital discharged him.
At the National Recruiting Center, Colonel Stanikzai keeps working, but he admits to a bleak outlook. “The news of the American withdrawal has weakened our morale and boosted the morale of the enemy,” he said. “I am sorry to speak so frankly. If the international community abandons us again, we won’t be able to last.”
The colonel’s hunt for infiltrators is rooted in realism. Often the Taliban cellphone telltales are adopted by people in rural areas as a protection in case the insurgents stop them, he said, so alone they are hardly grounds for dismissal.
One day last month, his caseload included a convicted murderer from Kunduz: Abdullah, a 30-year-old who has only one name. He had neglected to mention his criminal record, but it was discovered through biometric files compiled with American assistance.
Abdullah pleaded that his offense had been a crime of passion and that the victim’s family had forgiven him and accepted the customary blood money. Colonel Stanikzai sent him back to Kunduz to get a letter from the police chief certifying him for service. Abdullah tried to kiss the colonel’s hand in gratitude.
“We are going through a very, very hard time here,” the colonel said.
From this article it sounds like Emperor Obama is considering drone strikes against Libya, thinking they may help him get reelected in 2012 by being "tough on terrorists".
Of course drone strikes on Libya would be an illegal act of war by the President violating both the U.S. Constitution and International law.
But don't count on the President obeying the law. American Presidents have routinely violated both the U.S. Constitution and International Law many times since World War II, when the American Empire has invaded or bomb countries through out the world.
White House mulls how to strike over Libya attack
Oct. 15, 2012 03:45 PM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The White House has put special operations strike forces on standby and moved drones into the skies above Africa, ready to strike militant targets from Libya to Mali -- if investigators can find the al-Qaida-linked group responsible for the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya.
But officials say the administration, with weeks until the presidential election, is weighing whether the short-term payoff of exacting retribution on al-Qaida is worth the risk that such strikes could elevate the group's profile in the region, alienate governments the U.S. needs to fight it in the future and do little to slow the growing terror threat in North Africa.
Details on the administration's position and on its search for a possible target were provided by three current and one former administration official, as well as an analyst who was approached by the White House for help. All four spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the high-level debates publicly.
The dilemma shows the tension of the White House's need to demonstrate it is responding forcefully to al-Qaida, balanced against its long-term plans to develop relationships and trust with local governments and build a permanent U.S. counterterrorist network in the region.
Vice President Joe Biden pledged in his debate last week with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to find those responsible for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.
"We will find and bring to justice the men who did this," Biden said in response to a question about whether intelligence failures led to lax security around Stevens and the consulate. Referring back to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, Biden said American counterterror policy should be, "if you do harm to America, we will track you to the gates of hell if need be."
The White House declined to comment on the debate over how best to respond to the Benghazi attack.
The attack has become an issue in the U.S. election season, with Republicans accusing the Obama administration of being slow to label the assault an act of terrorism early on, and slow to strike back at those responsible.
"They are aiming for a small pop, a flash in the pan, so as to be able to say, 'Hey, we're doing something about it,'" said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rudy Attalah, the former Africa counterterrorism director for the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush.
Attalah noted that in 1998, after the embassy bombing in Nairobi, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles to take out a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that may have been producing chemical weapons for al-Qaida.
"It was a way to say, 'Look, we did something,'" he said.
A Washington-based analyst with extensive experience in Africa said that administration officials have approached him asking for help in connecting the dots to Mali, whose northern half fell to al-Qaida-linked rebels this spring. They wanted to know if he could suggest potential targets, which he says he was not able to do.
"The civilian side is looking into doing something, and is running into a lot of pushback from the military side," the analyst said. "The resistance that is coming from the military side is because the military has both worked in the region and trained in the region. So they are more realistic."
Islamists in the region are preparing for a reaction from the U.S.
"If America hits us, I promise you that we will multiply the Sept. 11 attack by 10," said Oumar Ould Hamaha, a spokesman for the Islamists in northern Mali, while denying that his group or al-Qaida fighters based in Mali played a role in the Benghazi attack.
Finding the militants who overwhelmed a small security force at the consulate isn't going to be easy.
The key suspects are members of the Libyan militia group Ansar al-Shariah. The group has denied responsibility, but eyewitnesses saw Ansar fighters at the consulate, and U.S. intelligence intercepted phone calls after the attack from Ansar fighters to leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, bragging about it. The affiliate's leaders are known to be mostly in northern Mali, where they have seized a territory as large as Texas following a coup in the country's capital.
But U.S. investigators have only loosely linked "one or two names" to the attack, and they lack proof that it was planned ahead of time, or that the local fighters had any help from the larger al-Qaida affiliate, officials say.
If that proof is found, the White House must decide whether to ask Libyan security forces to arrest the suspects with an eye to extraditing them to the U.S. for trial, or to simply target the suspects with U.S. covert action.
U.S. officials say covert action is more likely. The FBI couldn't gain access to the consulate until weeks after the attack, so it is unlikely it will be able to build a strong criminal case. The U.S. is also leery of trusting the arrest and questioning of the suspects to the fledgling Libyan security forces and legal system still building after the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
The burden of proof for U.S. covert action is far lower, but action by the CIA or special operations forces still requires a body of evidence that shows the suspect either took part in the violence or presents a "continuing and persistent, imminent threat" to U.S. targets, current and former officials said.
"If the people who were targeted were themselves directly complicit in this attack or directly affiliated with a group strongly implicated in the attack, then you can make an argument of imminence of threat," said Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.
But if the U.S. acts alone to target them in Africa, " it raises all kinds of sovereignty issues ... and makes people very uncomfortable," said Grenier, who has criticized the CIA's heavy use of drones in Pakistan without that government's support.
Even a strike that happens with permission could prove problematic, especially in Libya or Mali where al-Qaida supporters are currently based. Both countries have fragile, interim governments that could lose popular support if they are seen allowing the U.S. unfettered access to hunt al-Qaida.
The Libyan government is so wary of the U.S. investigation expanding into unilateral action that it refused requests to arm the drones now being flown over Libya. Libyan officials have complained publicly that they were unaware of how large the U.S. intelligence presence was in Benghazi until a couple of dozen U.S. officials showed up at the airport after the attack, waiting to be evacuated -- roughly twice the number of U.S. staff the Libyans thought were there. A number of those waiting to be evacuated worked for U.S. intelligence, according to two American officials.
In Mali, U.S. officials have urged the government to allow special operations trainers to return, to work with Mali's forces to push al-Qaida out of that country's northern area. AQIM is among the groups that filled the power vacuum after a coup by rebellious Malian forces in March. U.S. special operations forces trainers left Mali just days after the coup. While such trainers have not been invited to return, the U.S. has expanded its intelligence effort on Mali, focusing satellite and spy flights over the contested northern region to track and map the militant groups vying for control of the territory, officials say.
In northern Mali, residents in the three largest cities say they hear the sound of airplanes overhead but can't spot them. That's standard for drones, which are often invisible to the naked eye, flying several thousand feet above ground.
Residents say the plane sounds have increased sharply in recent weeks, following both the attack in Benghazi and the growing calls for a military intervention in Mali.
Chabane Arby, a 23-year-old student from Timbuktu, said the planes make a growling sound overhead. "When they hear them, the Islamists come out and start shooting into the sky," he said.
Aboubacrine Aidarra, another resident of Timbuktu, said the planes circle overhead both day and night. "I have a friend who said he recently saw six at one time, circling overhead. ... They are planes that fly at high altitudes. But they make a big sound. "
Let's outlaw intelligence
Oct. 15, 2012 06:14 PM
To paraphrase Will Rogers, let's outlaw intelligence in America.
If it works as well as prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s did and as well as the "war on drugs" currently does, in five years, we'll be the smartest nation on the planet.
-- Bill Betz, Mesa
I suspect the DEA would love to have 100 sick people be in pain without their medicine if their silly rules would prevent one junkie from getting high.
Let's face it the "War on Drugs" is really a war on the American people and a war on the Bill of Rights.
A New Painkiller Crackdown Targets Drug Distributors
By BARRY MEIER
Published: October 17, 2012
A local druggist in Newport Beach, Calif., never expected that the federal government’s recent crackdown on distributors of prescription painkillers would ensnare him.
But in June, Cardinal Health, a major distributor, abruptly cut off his supplies of narcotics like OxyContin and Percocet. A few months earlier, the Drug Enforcement Administration had accused Cardinal of ignoring signs that some pharmacies in Florida that it supplied with such drugs might be feeding street demand for them.
Cardinal told the druggist, Michael Pavlovich, that the volume of pain drugs and other controlled medications he was dispensing was too high, a situation he said was explainable. His pharmacy specializes in pain patients, he said. Still, it took weeks for Cardinal to start supplying him again, and even then, it limited its shipments to about 15 percent of his previous orders. As a result, Mr. Pavlovich said, many of his patients had to go elsewhere to get prescriptions filled.
“We have to convince them that our dispensing is legitimate,” he said of his dealings with Cardinal.
Cardinal’s crackdown on Mr. Pavlovich was a sign of a new approach by the D.E.A. to stem the growing misuse and abuse of painkillers. In the last decade, the agency has tried a variety of tactics with limited success, from arresting hundreds of doctors to closing scores of pharmacies. Now, it and other agencies are moving up the pharmaceutical food chain, putting pressure on distributors like Cardinal, which act as middlemen between drug makers and the pharmacies and doctors that dispense painkillers.
In response, the distributors are scrambling to limit their liability by more closely monitoring their distribution pipelines and cutting off some customers.
Since January, for example, Cardinal has cut ties with a dozen pharmacies in states including Arizona, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, interviews and court records show. In doing so, the wholesaler, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, cited audits suggesting that people seeking to buy prescription drugs illegally might have targeted the store in question.
Several of the affected drugstores sued Cardinal unsuccessfully to resume supplies, but documents filed in those actions show that until recently, the wholesaler shipped large volumes of pain pills to the stores for months, if not years.
George S. Barrett, Cardinal’s chairman and chief executive, said the company had tightened the criteria it used in determining whether to sell narcotics to a pharmacy. In May, Cardinal settled the action brought by the D.E.A. in connection with its Florida sales by agreeing to suspend shipments of controlled drugs, like narcotics, from a facility in that state for two years. It could also face a significant fine.
“We had a strong antidiversion system in place, but no system is perfect,” Mr. Barrett said. Among other steps, the company said it had created a special committee to regularly evaluate pharmacies that order high volumes of narcotic drugs.
Another major distributor, AmerisourceBergen, recently disclosed that it faces a federal criminal inquiry into its oversight of painkiller sales. And in June, West Virginia officials filed a lawsuit against 14 drug distributors, including Cardinal and AmerisourceBergen, charging that they had fed illicit painkiller use in that state. The companies have denied wrongdoing.
D.E.A. officials have heralded the Cardinal action as the forerunner of a more aggressive approach to the painkiller problem. But critics say that for years, the agency did little to scrutinize distributors who were making tens of millions of dollars from the prescriptions generated by pain clinics in Florida, Ohio and other states. These facilities, often described as “pill mills,” employed doctors who wrote narcotics prescriptions after cursory examinations of patients.
“In the case of West Virginia, they have done nothing,” said a lawyer in Charleston, James M. Cagle, who is working on the state’s action against distributors.
The drug distribution system is a sprawling one that involves about 800 companies, which range in size from a few giants like Cardinal to hundreds of small firms. For wholesalers, the markup on medications can be small, sometimes a few pennies a pill. But with billions of pills sold annually, the profits can be big. Narcotic painkillers are now the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States, with sales last year of $8.5 billion.
This is not the first time the industry has faced scrutiny. In 2008, Cardinal paid $34 million to settle charges that it failed to alert the D.E.A. to suspicious orders for millions of pain pills that it was shipping to Internet pharmacies — operations that for years supplied the illicit market. The same year, another big distributor, McKesson, paid $13 million to settle similar charges. As part of the agreements, both companies denied wrongdoing.
Executives like Mr. Barrett of Cardinal say that it is often difficult for a distributor to tell whether a pharmacy or a doctor is serving legitimate pain patients or supplying illicit drug demand. And distributors have long complained that the D.E.A. has never issued specific guidelines for when they should stop shipping to a customer.
But agency officials say that wholesalers know about the red flags. For example, the agency charged that Cardinal was selling 50 times the amount of pain pills containing the narcotic oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin and other drugs, to its four top pharmacy customers in Florida than it was supplying to the average drugstore in that state.
Cardinal failed to scrutinize such sales, the agency said, even violating the safeguards it promised to put in place when it agreed to settle the government charges in connection with its supplying of Internet pharmacies. “Everyone is making a large amount of money on these drugs,” said Joseph T. Rannazzisi, a deputy assistant administrator of the D.E.A. division that oversees legal drugs, like painkillers.
The D.E.A. is able to track where painkillers are going because distributors regularly file reports detailing their shipments to customers. But just how aggressively the agency uses that data is anyone’s guess.
An agency employee, Michelle Cooper, testified last year that she had attended a training session at which instructors described how investigators like her could use the database to identify suspicious distributors. In doing so, they pointed to data showing that a distributor had suddenly started shipping large and growing volumes of pain pills to Florida drugstores.
It was only later that Ms. Cooper discovered that the case involved a real distributor, not a hypothetical one, and that the company was still making those shipments despite the agency’s apparent awareness of them.
“I didn’t believe the numbers they were showing us were real,” she said. “I thought it was for training purposes.”
Ms. Cooper subsequently investigated the company, Keysource Medical, which agreed last year to give up its license to distribute narcotic drugs.
Faced with Congressional pressure, agency officials like Mr. Rannazzisi have said that they are increasing the ranks of investigators like Ms. Cooper, and that they provide distribution data to state officials when local authorities request it as part of an investigation.
But state officials say it would be more helpful to get that data routinely so they can act more quickly against rogue clinics and pharmacies. For years, Ohio law enforcement authorities did not know which distributors were supplying the many pill mills operating in the state, one official said. If the D.E.A. had supplied that information, “we would have known about the number of shipments going into Ohio and where they were going,” said Aaron Haslam, an assistant state attorney general.
Also, while the D.E.A. brings actions against distributors like Cardinal for failing to notify the agency of a “suspicious order” from a pharmacy or other customer, it does not share those reports with officials in the state where the pharmacy is based.
In response to a request from The New York Times, the agency even declined to disclose the number of such reports it received annually. A spokeswoman, Barbara Carreno, said in a statement that the agency considered such statistics “law enforcement sensitive” information, but she did not elaborate.
The Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking that data.
Fair trial. Ask the CIA if you deserve a "fair trial" and they will tell
you that you won't get a fair trail if they decide you are a criminal.
The CIA will give you a fair chance to run from a drone launched
missile if they decide to execute you for crimes you have allegedly committed.
I can only wonder when the DEA will be requesting drones to executed suspected drug dealers with!
CIA seeks to expand drone fleet, officials say
By Greg Miller, Published: October 18
The CIA is urging the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, a move that would extend the spy service’s decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force, U.S. officials said.
The proposal by CIA Director David H. Petraeus would bolster the agency’s ability to sustain its campaigns of lethal strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and enable it, if directed, to shift aircraft to emerging al-Qaeda threats in North Africa or other trouble spots, officials said.
If approved, the CIA could add as many as 10 drones, the officials said, to an inventory that has ranged between 30 and 35 over the past few years.
The outcome has broad implications for counterterrorism policy and whether the CIA gradually returns to being an organization focused mainly on gathering intelligence, or remains a central player in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects abroad.
In the past, officials from the Pentagon and other departments have raised concerns about the CIA’s expanding arsenal and involvement in lethal operations, but a senior Defense official said that the Pentagon had not opposed the agency’s current plan.
Officials from the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon declined to comment on the proposal. Officials who discussed it did so on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the subject.
One U.S. official said the request reflects a concern that political turmoil across the Middle East and North Africa has created new openings for al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
“With what happened in Libya, we’re realizing that these places are going to heat up,” the official said, referring to the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. No decisions have been made about moving armed CIA drones into these regions, but officials have begun to map out contingencies. “I think we’re actually looking forward a little bit,” the official said.
White House officials are particularly concerned about the emergence of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa, which has gained weapons and territory following the collapse of the governments in Libya and Mali. Seeking to bolster surveillance in the region, the United States has been forced to rely on small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes.
Meanwhile, the campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen has heated up. Yemeni officials said a strike on Thursday — the 35th this year — killed at least seven al-Qaeda-linked militants near Jaar, a town in southern Yemen previously controlled by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the terrorist group’s affiliate is known.
The CIA’s proposal would have to be evaluated by a group led by President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, officials said.
The group, which includes senior officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, is directly involved in deciding which alleged al-Qaeda operatives are added to “kill” lists. But current and former officials said the group also plays a lesser-known role as referee in deciding the allocation of assets, including whether the CIA or the Defense Department takes possession of newly delivered drones.
“You have to state your requirements and the system has to agree that your requirements trump somebody else,” said a former high-ranking official who participated in the deliberations. “Sometimes there is a food fight.”
The administration has touted the collaboration between the CIA and the military in counterterrorism operations, contributing to a blurring of their traditional roles. In Yemen, the CIA routinely “borrows” the aircraft of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command to carry out strikes. The JSOC is increasingly engaged in activities that resemble espionage.
The CIA’s request for more drones indicates that Petraeus has become convinced that there are limits to those sharing arrangements and that the agency needs full control over a larger number of aircraft.
The U.S. military’s fleet dwarfs that of the CIA. A Pentagon report issued this year counted 246 Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks in the Air Force inventory alone, with hundreds of other remotely piloted aircraft distributed among the Army, the Navy and the Marines.
Petraeus, who had control of large portions of those fleets while serving as U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had to adjust to a different resource scale at the CIA, officials said. The agency’s budget has begun to tighten, after double-digit increases over much of the past decade.
“He’s not used to the small budget over there,” a U.S. congressional official said. In briefings on Capitol Hill, Petraeus often marvels at the agency’s role relative to its resources, saying, “We do so well with so little money we have.” The official declined to comment on whether Petraeus had requested additional drones.
Early in his tenure at the CIA, Petraeus was forced into a triage situation with the agency’s inventory of armed drones. To augment the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric linked to al-Qaeda terrorist plots, Petraeus moved several CIA drones from Pakistan to Yemen. After Awlaki was killed in a drone strike, the aircraft were sent back to Pakistan, officials said.
The number of strikes in Pakistan has dropped from 122 two years ago to 40 this year, according to the New America Foundation. But officials said the agency has not cut back on its patrols there, despite the killing of Osama bin Laden and a dwindling number of targets.
The agency continues to search for bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and has carried out dozens of strikes against the Haqqani network, a militant group behind attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The CIA also maintains a separate, smaller fleet of stealth surveillance aircraft. Stealth drones were used to monitor bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their use in surveillance flights over Iran’s nuclear facilities was exposed when one crashed in that country last year.
Any move to expand the reach of the CIA’s fleet of armed drones probably would require the agency to establish additional secret bases. The agency relies on U.S. military pilots to fly the planes from bases in the southwestern United States but has been reluctant to share overseas landing strips with the Defense Department.
CIA Predators that are used in Pakistan are flown out of airstrips along the border in Afghanistan. The agency opened a secret base on the Arabian Peninsula when it began flights over Yemen, even though JSOC planes are flown from a separate facility in Djibouti.
Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
This water is not part of the US, but the American military seems to have decided that it is the US Military's job to police it.
As H. L. Mencken said:
In a warming Arctic, U.S. faces new security and safety concerns
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
October 19, 2012, 6:00 a.m.
BARROW, Alaska — In past years, these remote gray waters of the Alaskan Arctic saw little more than the occasional cargo barge and Eskimo whaling boat. No more.
This summer, when the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bertholf was monitoring shipping traffic along the desolate tundra coast, its radar displays were often brightly lighted with mysterious targets.
There were oil drilling rigs, research vessels, fuel barges, small cruise ships. A few were sailboats that had ventured through the Northwest Passage above Canada. On a single day in August, 95 ships were detected between Prudhoe Bay and Wainwright off America's least defended coastline, and for some of them, Coast Guard officials had no idea what the vessels were carrying or who was on them.
"There's probably 1,500 people out there," Rear Adm. Thomas P. Ostebo, commander of the Coast Guard's 17th District in Alaska, said at a recent conference of Arctic policymakers near Anchorage. "It's kind of spinning a little bit out of control."
The rapid melting of the polar ice cap is turning the once ice-clogged waters off northern Alaska into a navigable ocean, and the rush to grab the region's abundant oil and mineral resources by way of new shipping lanes is posing safety and security concerns for Coast Guard patrols.
What happens if a cruise ship gets stranded in stray ice? Or if a sailing vessel capsizes off an uninhabited coast?
"Yesterday, we saw three sailing vessels in 24 hours," said the Bertholf's commander, Capt. Thomas E. Crabbs.
The Coast Guard this summer ran Arctic Shield, the most extensive patrol operation it has ever mounted in the Arctic. It set up a temporary operating base and remote communications station at Barrow.
A fleet of cutters, buoy tenders, helicopters and boarding vessels deployed across the Beaufort, Chukchi and Bering seas to oversee new offshore oil drilling operations offers search-and-rescue if needed and provides notice to burgeoning ship traffic that the U.S. is monitoring its northernmost border.
The rush for riches as Russia, Norway and Canada vie with the U.S. for the Arctic's mineral resources, and the possibility that drug dealers, arms merchants and terrorists could begin to explore transport routes near America's largest oil fields have prompted the U.S. military to begin planning for a future in the Arctic much more substantial than it had envisioned.
The U.S. Naval War College last year conducted war games simulating the sinking of a ship carrying weapons of mass destruction from North Africa to Asia across the top of Canada and Alaska.
The Air Force has been practicing how to make food and survival gear drops to survivors of a large plane crash in the unbelievably remote Brooks Range, north of Fairbanks.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, already has gone beyond drills: F-15 fighters have been launched on interceptions at least 50 times during the last five years in response to Russian long-range bombers — not previously seen here since the Cold War — which have been provocatively skirting the edges of U.S. airspace.
Through it all, U.S. security forces are battling historically sketchy radio communications, vicious storms, shifting ice floes and huge distances from base: Coast Guard cutters must sail 1,200 miles south just to take on food and refuel.
"All of the uniqueness of operating up in the Arctic represents huge challenges for us," said Royal Canadian Air Force Col. Dan Constable, deputy commander of NORAD's Alaska region.
The Naval War College games in September 2011 were an early test, and not an encouraging one. Many of the scenarios rehearsed, former Navy Cmdr. Christopher Gray said, ran into problems with poor communications and trouble maintaining supplies of food, fuel and supplies.
"Does the Navy have the ability to go up and operate a number of ships, a number of aircraft, for a sustained period of time in this environment, where it's cold, it's got bad weather, it's got a lot of ice, and it's really far away from everything that supports you? What we found is that the answer is, not really," Gray said.
The Bertholf is especially suited to summertime operations in the Far North. Though not capable of operating in ice, it is equipped with high-efficiency engines and stability systems that allow the vessel and its crew of 146 to remain in the Arctic for a month at a time — heretofore unheard of in the U.S. fleet.
"Because we're present here and because we have the endurance to remain here throughout the season, we're going to be able to understand who is in the maritime domain," Crabbs said as a small vessel carrying boarding troops was launched off the Bertholf's stern for a closer look at nearby shipping traffic.
U.S. officials say they are still several decades away from needing a full-scale military presence in the region, and with luck, there will be no need to resort to arms: The real source of conflict is the battle everyone faces — with the elements.
"If somebody were to invade the Canadian High North," Canadian Forces chief of staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk said at the Arctic Imperative Summit, "my first problem would be to rescue them."
***
The move to secure the Arctic goes well beyond domestic security. With easier access to the more than 90 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the Arctic, nations are rushing to gain international recognition of territorial claims, mineral contracts and shipping routes.
On Aug. 2, the Chinese icebreaker Snow Dragon completed an unprecedented voyage across the top of the world through the Northwest Passage.
Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson was paid a visit by a delegation of senior Chinese officials who wanted to discuss Beijing's bid for permanent observer status in the Arctic Council, the suddenly powerful organization of eight nations with territory in the Arctic Circle.
"And China is not the only Asian country interested in the Arctic," Grimsson said at the Arctic summit. Singapore and South Korea, he said, also want in.
The U.S. has been slow to stake out its own territory. While Russia has submitted a claim for thousands of miles of seabed, and Canada is asserting title to mineral-rich areas along the U.S. border, the United States is the only Arctic nation that has not ratified the 1982 treaty known as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — the international mechanism for brokering such claims.
The U.S. has also fallen behind on what the Coast Guard needs to patrol the new mineral development zones. The only working icebreaker is the cutter Healy, with a second being refurbished that is due to return soon. Russia, by contrast, has 25 icebreakers, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. Finland and Sweden have seven each, Canada six.
"I think it's a real-time imperative for our nation to get its arms around these things," Rear Adm. Ostebo said. "It's critically important to understand that we do not control it. The rest of the world has a boat here, and we are late to the table."
kim.murphy@latimes.com
Do we really need 9,100 military employees in Arizona???
One good question is why on earth does the state of Arizona need the 9,100 people in the National Guard, of which 2,376 are full time employees? I suspect they all could be fires and the state of Arizona would continue to function without any problems.
Afghan Army’s Turnover Threatens U.S. Strategy
Sounds like the "war in Afghanistan" is really an American welfare program for the puppet government we installed in Afghanistan.
Will Obama bomb Libya to get reelected???
Will Obama order drone strikes on Libya to get reelected in 2012?
Let's outlaw intelligence
Source
DEA Painkiller Crackdown Targets Drug Distributors
DEA Painkiller Crackdown Targets Drug Distributors
CIA wants drones to kill with
CIA wants drones so it can be the judge, jury and executioner??
US military creates job program for itself in Arctic??
A jobs program the military created for it's self???
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Source
Were some issues missing from these debates?
Some choice for President - Obamney or Rombama - forget Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. In this editorial Vin points out that the Presidential debates are rigged to exclude third parties like Gary Johnson from the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein from the Green Party.Hey, we all know that either Obamney or Rombama is going to win the election, so what hard could there be in letting the Libertarians and Greens into the debate. It would give us some new interesting ideas.
Like legalizing drugs, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and repealing the unconstitutional Patriot Act.
Sheriff Joe's IT guy
Since I am a computer geek, I figured I would include this
article
I saw on the New Times about Sheriff Joe's IT guy.
He is of Chad Willems who operates a business called
of Summit Consulting when he isn't working at his full time
job at Maricopa County.
And no I don't work for Sheriff Joe and wouldn't work for him if you paid me.
Let's hope Sheriff Joe loses this election and is replaced by Paul Penzone.
Of course Paul Penzone isn't much better then Sheriff Joe, but it certainly would be nice to get rid of Sheriff Joe who has been terrorizing the citizens of Maricopa County for the last 20 years.
AG Tom Horne redacts anything that makes him look bad???
Remember Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne is the guy who asked Governor Jan Brewer to declare Prop 203 null and void so he could arrest medical marijuana patients.I bet that was a smoke screen to cover up his crimes.
Redacted parts of AG Office documents allege impropriety
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Oct 23, 2012 12:34 AM
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office redacted allegations about an alleged affair between Tom Horne and one of his subordinates, and disparaging information about another employee and political ally, a comparison of documents shows.
The redactions could violate state public-records law, some legal experts say.
The Arizona Public Records Law requires state and local government agencies to make various public records open for inspection by any person unless it is confidential by law, or if privacy interests outweigh the public’s interest or if disclosure is not in the state’s best interest.
The Attorney General’s Office in August produced for The Arizona Republic and other media hundreds of records that stemmed from a 2011 internal investigation Horne ordered into suspected media leaks. The records included eight memos — some with large areas redacted — summarizing interviews of attorney-general employees by Horne’s investigator, Margaret “Meg” Hinchey.
Earlier this month, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office produced unredacted versions of six Hinchey memos as part of the records it released tied to an investigation into alleged campaign-finance violations by Horne and his employee Kathleen Winn. County Attorney Bill Montgomery has accused the pair of illegally coordinating tactics during the 2010 election with an independent-expenditure committee Winn chaired. Horne and Winn deny the allegations and have vowed to fight them in court.
A comparison of the two versions of six memos shows the Attorney General’s Office redacted information about an alleged personal relationship between Horne, a married man, and Assistant Attorney General Carmen Chenal, a long-time Horne employee and confidant.
The office also redacted an employee statement that focused on Winn performing private work on government time — a practice that Horne personally sanctioned — as well as remarks witnesses made about Winn’s behavior.
When asked Monday if he would comment on the personal allegations against him, Horne responded via text, “Cole’s characterization is appropriate.”
Arizona Solicitor General David Cole, who oversaw the redactions, said “speculative, mean spirited, nasty gossip that can be false and that can be the subject of lawsuits for defamation does not serve the public interest.”
Chenal could not be reached for comment late Monday.
Winn said statements made by witnesses about her were false, describing one witness as “mentally unstable,” and Hinchey as a sloppy investigator who must not have fully understood witnesses’ statements.
Amy Rezzonico, Horne’s spokeswoman, said the redactions were consistent with state law, and based on privacy, confidentiality and the best interests of the state. In an e-mailed statement, she wrote it is office policy “to redact information that is known to be defamatory and false. It is also the policy of this office to redact extraneous gossip, innuendo, rumors, and hurtful remarks that have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of the agency and that can cause damage to individuals and the agency.”
First Amendment lawyers and experts, however, said the records shed light on the conduct of public officials and should not be redacted.
“The courts have consistently held that just because something is embarrassing to a public official does not mean that it should not be released as part of a public-records request,” said lawyer Dan Barr, who reviewed both versions of the memos. “The best interests of the state do not equate with the best interests of public officials.”
Lawyers also pointed to the attorney general’s own handbook, a guide for agencies to use when determining which documents are subject to public scrutiny under the Arizona Public Records Law. That handbook specifically cites one Arizona court, which found, “The cloak of confidentiality may not be used, however, to save an officer or public body from inconvenience or embarrassment.”
Cole, who reports to Horne, said Horne was not involved in deciding what information was redacted.
Cole wrote in an e-mail to The Republic that he has a public-records committee comprised of seasoned lawyers to ensure the agency follows the law. He cited case law that he believes shows his office acted properly in redacting the material.
Kathryn Marquoit, assistant ombudsman for public access at the state ombudsman’s office, has not reviewed the redactions. Generally, she said, agencies must find that it would be an invasion of privacy before it redacts such information.
“Just because it’s personal information doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an invasion of privacy,” she said, saying in this case, the agency appears to try to make a case that the information is not public because it does not deal with the public business.
“But I think that’s a tough argument to make,” she said.
In July 2011, Horne handpicked Hinchey to conduct a confidential internal investigation to determine if someone within the office had leaked information to the PhoenixNew Times regarding his hiring of Chenal despite a history of problems with her law license. Hinchey interviewed numerous employees, obtained access to staff phone records and e-mails, and searched Winn’s office once she became the suspected source of the leak.
The Attorney General’s Office’s redactions to Hinchey’s notes included:
Numerous references to an alleged affair between Horne and Chenal. Lucia de Vernai, a legal assistant, stated she heard Winn mention the rumor of an affair between Horne and Chenal five to ten times.
Assistant Attorney General Michael Flynn recalled another employee telling him about a video of Horne and Chenal walking together and that “Horne’s arms swung in a manner, that just prior to going off camera, that one might think AG Horne was about to give Chenal a ‘butt pat.’”
Numerous references to employees dislike of Winn because of her alleged “jealousy” of other women she perceived to be close to Horne, her alleged treatment of other employees and Winn’s alleged giddiness after the New Times wrote a story about the alleged affair between Horne and Chenal.
Linnea Heap, a collector in the agency, stated Winn made “snarky” comments about Heap’s friendship with Chenal and said Winn talked about being contacted by a reporter about “the rumor of an affair” between Chenal and Horne.
Heap also recalled a conversation with Winn during the 2010 campaign, according to the notes. “Heap indicated that she thinks Winn desires the attention and that it seems she is now trying to be ‘Mrs. AG,’” the notes stated.
Winn told The Republic she is happily married and is not jealous of any women at the office.
“I’m very secure in who I am,” she said. “I have a great relationship with the AG.”
De Vernai recalled a conversation she had with Winn, in which she said Winn stated, “C’mon. If Tom was going to have an affair, who do you think he would have one with? Carmen or me?”
De Vernai also recalled a dinner, where Winn told her, Chenal and one other woman, “I’m the new girlfriend. You’re the crabby old one.” De Vernai said the other woman, who helped out during the 2010 election, responded she would “arm wrestle” Winn for Horne.
Winn said she did not say that.
Numerous references to employees’ exasperation with Winn, whom one employee alleged inserts herself into work-related matters she was not qualified to handle. For example, Flynn was uncomfortable that Winn allegedly gave her personal cellphone number to a juvenile who sought her advice on an incident while attending a “sexting” lecture. “Flynn does not think Winn should have done that as she makes herself a witness to a crime and likely is not qualified to provide such ‘counseling,’” Hinchey’s notes read.
Flynn also told Hinchey he had the impression Winn thinks she is a “cop, an attorney and a counselor.” Hinchey wrote Flynn was aware of Winn “conducting her own investigation into some party level activity related to precinct party voting.”
Former Assistant Attorney General Gerald Richard told Hinchey that Winn once asked him to get Chenal to use her relationship with Horne to get Winn a raise. Winn earns an annual salary of about $100,000.
Winn said she does not recall that conversation.
De Vernai said she believed Winn, who has a real-estate-related background, “solicits employees” as clients, and that she has reported concerns about Winn twice to Horne who responded he “won’t fire her.”
Winn said she has never solicited work from employees. Records provided to The Republic in the past show Horne allowed Winn to perform private real-estate-related work on government time.
Tom Horne's office withholds public information to protect ... Tom Horne
Remember Tom Horne is the guy who asked Governor Jan Brewer to declare Prop 203 null and void so he could continue arresting medical marijuana smokers.I bet that was a smoke screen to cover up his crimes.
Tom Horne's office withholds public information to protect ... Tom Horne
By LAURIE ROBERTS
Mon, Oct 22 2012
We take you now to the latest in As the State Spins, the daytime drama starring everybody’s favorite attorney general, Tom Horne.
When we last left our story, we had learned that our hero was suspected of having an affair with an assistant attorney general he’d hired – a woman whose qualifications were, let’s just say, less than impressive. And, that Horne and another of his hires – a women who ran a supposedly independent campaign to help get him elected – have been accused of violating campaign-finance laws.
The state’s top law enforcement official has dodged accusations of an affair and denied trying to cheat his way into office by coordinating with a supposedly “independent” campaign that was pouring money into his 2010 election bid.
Which brings us to today’s episode: Public Records, Schmublic Records…. in which we learn that the Attorney General’s Office has been hiding records about embarrassing stuff. Things like his rumored affair with Assistant Attorney General Carmen Chenal and questions about the on-the-job conduct of Kathleen Winn, his campaign ally-turned-community-outreach-coordinator.
The story actually began in July 2011, when New Times columnist Stephen Lemons questioned why Horne would hire Chenal given that she had, among other things, long ago been suspended from practicing law.
(That is, until Horne helped her get her license back. She’s now on probation while serving as an assistant attorney general.)
Horne immediately launched an internal investigation. No, not to find out why his office was paying a six-figure salary to a woman who had questionable credentials, but to find the source of the leak to Lemons.
Instead, the investigator found evidence suggesting that Horne had violated state law by coordinating with Winn’s independent campaign. In August, Horne’s office released results of the leak investigation, as Arizona’s Public Records Law required. But the records were heavily censored.
Earlier this month, we found out why. That’s when Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, in announcing that Horne and Winn had violated campaign-finance laws, released a clean copy of the records.
Turns out all those pages blacked out by the Attorney General’s Office contained interviews with staffers who talked of Horne’s rumored long-time affair with Chenal. Of reports that Winn was calling herself Horne’s “new girlfriend” and “inserting herself” into cases where she had no business, given that she is neither an attorney nor an investigator. Of concerns that Winn was working on her mortgage broker business on state time.
Horne spokeswoman Amy Rezzonico said in an e-mail that the records were withheld “on the bases of privacy, confidentiality and best interests of the state.”
Indeed, the Arizona Supreme Court has said that records may be withheld “where recognition of the interests of privacy, confidentiality or the best interest of the state in carrying out its legitimate activities outweigh the general policy of open access.”
The court also has said the state must “specifically demonstrate how production of the documents would violate the rights of privacy or confidentiality or would be detrimental to the best interests of the state.”
The question here is, was Horne’s interest in keeping this stuff quiet in the best interest of the state? Or in the best interest of Horne?
Two experts on Arizona’s Public Records Law tell me there was no legitimate reason to withhold what were clearly public records.
“The courts have held that embarrassment for a public official is not a reason to redact information,” said attorney Dan Barr, who represents the First Amendment Coalition of Arizona.
Attorney David Bodney, who represents The Republic and 12News, called it “a risky overbroad approach to public information that prohibits the ability of the public to monitor the conduct.”
The people who control the information, however, seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to pick and choose what you and I get to know about how the chief law enforcement agency in the state is operated. Horne’s solicitor general, Dave Cole, said in an e-mail that a committee of lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office decided not to disclose the information and that Horne wasn’t involved in the decision.
“Speculative, mean spirited nasty gossip that can be false and that can be the subject of lawsuits for defamation does not serve the public interest,” Cole said.
Translation, Horne’s people weren’t protecting Horne. Or his assistant attorney general/rumored girlfriend. Or his campaign pal who now does…whatever it is she does over there at the Attorney General’s Office.
No, they were protecting us.
Really, they were.
As the state spins, you see, it also unravels.
Maybe a good way to reduce crime would be to fire all the cops who are tricking people into committing crimes. That would certainly reduce the crime rate.
And of course I suspect the FBI and Homeland Security is doing the same stuff at the Federal level. I have posted a number of article where the FBI has created bomb plots and then arrested people the tricked into participating in the fake bomb plots.
N.Y. police informant: Paid for ‘baiting’ Muslims
By Matt Apuzzo Associated Press Tue Oct 23, 2012 7:28 AM
NEW YORK — A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying bad things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.
Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.
“We need you to pretend to be one of them,” Rahman recalled the police telling him. “It’s street theater.”
Rahman, who said he plans to move to the Caribbean, said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was “detrimental to the Constitution.” After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been interviewed by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.
Rahman’s account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighborhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.
The AP corroborated Rahman’s account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler. The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police. Friends confirmed Rahman was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Rahman, said the tactics he described were used by informants.
Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD’s wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.
The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
Police recruited Rahman in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanor drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences. An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.
The next month, Rahman said, he was on the NYPD’s payroll.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday. He has denied widespread NYPD spying, saying police only follow leads.
In an Oct. 15 interview with the AP, however, Rahman said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.” He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.
Rahman said he thought he was doing important work protecting New York City and considered himself a hero.
One of his earliest assignments was to spy on a lecture at the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College in Manhattan. The speaker was Ali Abdul Karim, the head of security at the Masjid At-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn. The NYPD had been concerned about Karim for years and already had infiltrated the mosque, according to NYPD documents obtained by the AP.
Rahman also was instructed to monitor the student group itself, though he wasn’t told to target anyone specifically. His NYPD handler told him to take pictures of people at the events, determine who belonged to the student association and identify its leadership.
On Feb. 23, Rahman attended the event with Karim and listened, ready to catch what he called a “speaker’s gaffe.” The NYPD was interested in buzz words such as “jihad” and “revolution,” he said. Any radical rhetoric, the NYPD told him, needed to be reported.
Talha Shahbaz, then the vice president of the student group, met Rahman at the event. As Karim was finishing his talk on Malcolm X’s legacy, Rahman told Shahbaz that he wanted to know more about the student group. They had briefly attended the same high school.
Rahman said he wanted to turn his life around and stop using drugs, and said he believed Islam could provide a purpose in life. In the following days, Rahman friended him on Facebook and the two exchanged phone numbers. Shahbaz, a Pakistani who came to the U.S. more three years ago, introduced Rahman to other Muslims.
“He was telling us how he loved Islam and it’s changing him,” said Asad Dandia, who also became friends with Rahman.
Secretly, Rahman was mining his new friends for details about their lives, taking pictures of them when they ate at restaurants and writing down license plates on the orders of the NYPD.
On the NYPD’s instructions, he went to more events at John Jay, including when Siraj Wahhaj spoke in May. Wahhaj, 62, is a prominent but controversial New York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years. Prosecutors included his name on a list of people they said “may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged. In 2004, the NYPD placed Wahhaj on an internal terrorism watch list and noted: “Political ideology moderately radical and anti-American.”
That evening at John Jay, a friend took a photograph of Wahhaj with a grinning Rahman.
Rahman said he kept an eye on the MSA and used Shahbaz and his friends to facilitate traveling to events organized by the Islamic Circle of North America and Muslim American Society. The society’s annual convention in Connecticut draws a large number of Muslims and plenty of attention from the NYPD. According to NYPD documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD sent three informants there in 2008 and was keeping an eye on the group’s former president.
Rahman was told to spy on the speakers and collect information. The conference was called “Defending Religious Freedom.” Shahbaz paid Rahman’s travel expenses.
Rahman said he never witnessed any criminal activity or saw anybody do anything wrong.
He said he sometimes intentionally misinterpreted what people had said. For example, Rahman said he would ask people what they thought about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, knowing the subject was inflammatory. It was easy to take statements out of context, he said. He said wanted to please his NYPD handler, whom he trusted and liked.
“I was trying to get money,” Rahman said. “I was playing the game.”
Rahman said police never discussed the activities of the people he was assigned to target for spying. He said police told him once, “We don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. We just need to be sure.”
On some days, Rahman spent hours and covered miles in his undercover role. On Sept. 16, for example, he made his way in the morning to the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, snapping photographs of an imam and the sign-up sheet for those attending a regular class on Islamic instruction. He also provided their cell phone numbers to the NYPD. That evening he spied on people at Masjid Al-Ansar, also in Brooklyn.
Text messages on his phone showed that Rahman also took pictures last month of people attending the 27th annual Muslim Day Parade in Manhattan. The parade’s grand marshal was New York City Councilman Robert Jackson.
Rahman said he eventually tired of spying on his friends, noting that at times they delivered food to needy Muslim families. He said he once identified another NYPD informant spying on him. He took $200 more from the NYPD and told them he was done as an informant. He said the NYPD offered him more money, which he declined. He told friends on Facebook in early October that he had been a police spy but had quit. He also traded Facebook messages with Shahbaz, admitting he had spied on students at John Jay.
“I was an informant for the NYPD, for a little while, to investigate terrorism,” he wrote on Oct. 2. He said he no longer thought it was right. Perhaps he had been hunting terrorists, he said, “but I doubt it.”
“I hated that I was using people to make money,” Rahman said. “I made a mistake.”
The Top 20 Airports for TSA Theft
By MEGAN CHUCHMACH | ABC News
Your suitcase has been tagged and whisked away for a TSA security check before being loaded onto a plane en route to your final destination. How safe are the belongings inside? The TSA has fired nearly 400 employees for allegedly stealing from travelers, and for the first time, the agency is revealing the airports where those fired employees worked.
Newly released figures provided to ABC News by the TSA in response to a Freedom of Information Act request show that, unsurprisingly, many of the country's busiest airports also rank at the top for TSA employees fired for theft.
Sixteen of the top 20 airports for theft firings are also in the top 20 airports in terms of passengers passing through.
At the head of the list is Miami International Airport, which ranks twelfth in passengers but first in TSA theft firings, with 29 employees terminated for theft from 2002 through December 2011. JFK International Airport in New York is second with 27 firings, and Los Angeles International Airport is third with 24 firings. JFK ranks sixth in passenger traffic, while LAX is third. Chicago, while second in traffic, ranked 20th in theft firings.
The four airports listed in the TSA's top 20 list of employee firings for theft that aren't also among the FAA's top 20 for passenger activity are Salt Lake City International, Washington Dulles, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, and San Diego International.
The top airports across the U.S. for TSA employees fired for theft are:
1. Miami International Airport (29)
2. JFK International Airport (27)
3. Los Angeles International Airport (24)
4. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (17)
5. Las Vegas-McCarren International Airport (15)
6. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and New York-Laguardia Airport (14 each)
8. Newark Liberty, Philadelphia International, and Seattle-Tacoma International airports (12 each)
11. Orlando International Airport (11)
12. Houston-George Bush Intercontinental Airport and Salt Lake City International Airport (10 each)
14. Washington Dulles International Airport (9)
15. Detroit Metro Airport and Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (7)
17. Boston-Logan International, Denver International and San Diego International airports (6)
20. Chicago O'Hare International Airport (5)
During a recent ABC News investigation, an iPad left behind at a security checkpoint at the Orlando airport was tracked as it moved 30 miles away to the home of the TSA officer last seen handling it.
Confronted two weeks later by ABC News, the TSA officer, Andy Ramirez, at first denied having the missing iPad, but ultimately turned it over after blaming his wife for taking it from the airport. Ramirez was later fired by the TSA.
The iPad was one of ten purposely left behind at TSA checkpoints at major airports with a history of theft by government screeners, as part of an ABC News investigation into the TSA's ongoing problem with theft of passenger belongings. The other nine iPads were returned to ABC News after being left behind.
The agency disputes that theft is a widespread problem, however, saying the number of officers fired "represents less than one-half of one percent of officers that have been employed" by TSA.
Hearing on hold for accused USS bomber
By Ben Fox Associated Press Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:21 PM
KINGSTON, Jamaica -- A dispute over whether a defendant must be present during a military tribunal brought proceedings to a halt Tuesday in the case of a Guantanamo prisoner accused in the attack on the Navy destroyer the USS Cole.
Defendant Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 47, boycotted the pretrial motions hearing to protest the use of belly chains to move him from his cell at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Prosecutors wanted al-Nashiri brought to court to explain his reasoning on the record before any discussion of other motions in the case. The defense objected, saying any use of force could traumatize a man who they say was tortured in U.S. custody.
Complicating matters was Tropical Storm Sandy, which was forecast to grow into a hurricane as it heads north in the Caribbean Sea and possibly force the evacuation of the U.S. base in Cuba.
The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, decided after more than 90 minutes of debate that al-Nashiri must come to court Wednesday.
“Tomorrow, weather permitting, your client is coming,” Pohl told the defense team, before the hearing was adjourned for the rest of the day.
Whether a defendant must attend sessions of the tribunal has been a recurring theme with al-Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, as well as in the case of five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pohl, who presides over both cases, has previously ruled that defendants have a right to be absent from pretrial proceedings just as they have a right to be present for them.
He has not said yet whether they must attend their actual trials, which in both cases are not expected to start for at least a year. He has signaled he will likely require them to be in court once a jury is convened.
Prosecutors want the accused present for all proceedings, in part to eliminate any doubts about why they were absent that could later provide grounds for an appeal.
“The accused has to come to ensure the integrity of the trial,” the chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, said of al-Nashiri.
Al-Nashiri faces charges that include terrorism and murder in a special tribunal for wartime offenses known as a military commission for allegedly orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole, an attack that killed 17 sailors and wounded 37. He is also accused of setting up attacks on two other vessels. He could get the death penalty if convicted.
Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.
The only question I have is when will the President allow the DEA to add names of suspected drug dealers to his murder list.
Of course first it will only be suspected drug dealers in foreign countries, then over time suspected drug dealers in America will be added to the list.
Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists
By Greg Miller, Published: October 23
Editor’s note: This project, based on interviews with dozens of current and former national security officials, intelligence analysts and others, examines evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies and the practice of targeted killing. This is the first of three stories.
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.
“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”
That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.
Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Obama administration has touted its successes against the terrorist network, including the death of Osama bin Laden, as signature achievements that argue for President Obama’s reelection. The administration has taken tentative steps toward greater transparency, formally acknowledging for the first time the United States’ use of armed drones.
Less visible is the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war. Spokesmen for the White House, the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA and other agencies declined to comment on the matrix or other counterterrorism programs.
Privately, officials acknowledge that the development of the matrix is part of a series of moves, in Washington and overseas, to embed counterterrorism tools into U.S. policy for the long haul.
White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced.
CIA Director David H. Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, U.S. officials said. The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the agency’s transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence.
The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which carried out the raid that killed bin Laden, has moved commando teams into suspected terrorist hotbeds in Africa. A rugged U.S. outpost in Djibouti has been transformed into a launching pad for counterterrorism operations across the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
JSOC also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The elite command’s targeting cells have traditionally been located near the front lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But JSOC created a “national capital region” task force that is a 15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more directly involved in deliberations about al-Qaeda lists.
The developments were described by current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
These counterterrorism components have been affixed to a legal foundation for targeted killing that the Obama administration has discussed more openly over the past year. In a series of speeches, administration officials have cited legal bases, including the congressional authorization to use military force granted after the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the nation’s right to defend itself.
Critics contend that those justifications have become more tenuous as the drone campaign has expanded far beyond the core group of al-Qaeda operatives behind the strikes on New York and Washington. Critics note that the administration still doesn’t confirm the CIA’s involvement or the identities of those who are killed. Certain strikes are now under legal challenge, including the killings last year in Yemen of U.S.-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.
Counterterrorism experts said the reliance on targeted killing is self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs.
“The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”
An evolving database
The United States now operates multiple drone programs, including acknowledged U.S. military patrols over conflict zones in Afghanistan and Libya, and classified CIA surveillance flights over Iran.
Strikes against al-Qaeda, however, are carried out under secret lethal programs involving the CIA and JSOC. The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said.
The result is a single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all catalogued. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols.
Obama’s decision to shutter the CIA’s secret prisons ended a program that had become a source of international scorn, but it also complicated the pursuit of terrorists. Unless a suspect surfaced in the sights of a drone in Pakistan or Yemen, the United States had to scramble to figure out what to do.
“We had a disposition problem,” said a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix.
The database is meant to map out contingencies, creating an operational menu that spells out each agency’s role in case a suspect surfaces in an unexpected spot. “If he’s in Saudi Arabia, pick up with the Saudis,” the former official said. “If traveling overseas to al-Shabaab [in Somalia] we can pick him up by ship. If in Yemen, kill or have the Yemenis pick him up.”
Officials declined to disclose the identities of suspects on the matrix. They pointed, however, to the capture last year of alleged al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame off the coast of Yemen. Warsame was held for two months aboard a U.S. ship before being transferred to the custody of the Justice Department and charged in federal court in New York.
“Warsame was a classic case of ‘What are we going to do with him?’ ” the former counterterrorism official said. In such cases, the matrix lays out plans, including which U.S. naval vessels are in the vicinity and which charges the Justice Department should prepare.
“Clearly, there were people in Yemen that we had on the matrix,” as well as others in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the former counterterrorism official said. The matrix was a way to be ready if they moved. “How do we deal with these guys in transit? You weren’t going to fire a drone if they were moving through Turkey or Iran.”
Officials described the matrix as a database in development, although its status is unclear. Some said it has not been implemented because it is too cumbersome. Others, including officials from the White House, Congress and intelligence agencies, described it as a blueprint that could help the United States adapt to al-Qaeda’s morphing structure and its efforts to exploit turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East.
A year after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared the core of al-Qaeda near strategic defeat, officials see an array of emerging threats beyond Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — the three countries where almost all U.S. drone strikes have occurred.
The Arab spring has upended U.S. counterterrorism partnerships in countries including Egypt where U.S. officials fear al-Qaeda could establish new roots. The network’s affiliate in North Africa, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has seized territory in northern Mali and acquired weapons that were smuggled out of Libya.
“Egypt worries me to no end,” a high-ranking administration official said. “Look at Libya, Algeria and Mali and then across the Sahel. You’re talking about such wide expanses of territory, with open borders and military, security and intelligence capabilities that are basically nonexistent.”
Streamlining targeted killing
The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic.
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States recoiled at the idea of targeted killing. The Sept. 11 commission recounted how the Clinton administration had passed on a series of opportunities to target bin Laden in the years before the attacks — before armed drones existed. President Bill Clinton approved a set of cruise-missile strikes in 1998 after al-Qaeda bombed embassies in East Africa, but after extensive deliberation, and the group’s leader escaped harm.
Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.
This year, the White House scrapped a system in which the Pentagon and the National Security Council had overlapping roles in scrutinizing the names being added to U.S. target lists.
Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president.
Video-conference calls that were previously convened by Adm. Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been discontinued. Officials said Brennan thought the process shouldn’t be run by those who pull the trigger on strikes.
“What changed is rather than the chairman doing that, John chairs the meeting,” said Leiter, the former head of the NCTC.
The administration has also elevated the role of the NCTC, which was conceived as a clearinghouse for threat data and has no operational capability. Under Brennan, who served as its founding director, the center has emerged as a targeting hub.
Other entities have far more resources focused on al-Qaeda. The CIA, JSOC and U.S. Central Command have hundreds of analysts devoted to the terrorist network’s franchise in Yemen, while the NCTC has fewer than two dozen. But the center controls a key function.
“It is the keeper of the criteria,” a former U.S. counterterrorism official said, meaning that it is in charge of culling names from al-Qaeda databases for targeting lists based on criteria dictated by the White House.
The criteria are classified but center on obvious questions: Who are the operational leaders? Who are the key facilitators? A typical White House request will direct the NCTC to generate a list of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen involved in carrying out or plotting attacks against U.S. personnel in Sanaa.
The lists are reviewed at regular three-month intervals during meetings at the NCTC headquarters that involve analysts from other organizations, including the CIA, the State Department and JSOC. Officials stress that these sessions don’t equate to approval for additions to kill lists, an authority that rests exclusively with the White House.
With no objections — and officials said those have been rare — names are submitted to a panel of National Security Council officials that is chaired by Brennan and includes the deputy directors of the CIA and the FBI, as well as top officials from the State Department, the Pentagon and the NCTC.
Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama’s presence at “Terror Tuesday” meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president’s involvement is more indirect.
“The president would never come to a deputies meeting,” a senior administration official said, although participants recalled cases in which Brennan stepped out of the situation room to get Obama’s direction on questions the group couldn’t resolve.
The review process is compressed but not skipped when the CIA or JSOC has compelling intelligence and a narrow window in which to strike, officials said. The approach also applies to the development of criteria for “signature strikes,” which allow the CIA and JSOC to hit targets based on patterns of activity — packing a vehicle with explosives, for example — even when the identities of those who would be killed is unclear.
A model approach
For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.
During Monday’s presidential debate, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. “We can’t kill our way out of this,” he said, but added later that Obama was “right to up the usage” of drone strikes and that he would do the same.
As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen. The agency now aims many of its Predator strikes at the Haqqani network, which has been blamed for attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
In Yemen, the number of militants on the list has ranged from 10 to 15, officials said, and is not likely to slip into the single digits anytime soon, even though there have been 36 U.S. airstrikes this year.
The number of targets on the lists isn’t fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones’ cross hairs.
“Is the person currently Number 4 as good as the Number 4 seven years ago? Probably not,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official involved in the process until earlier this year. “But it doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”
In focusing on bureaucratic refinements, the administration has largely avoided confronting more fundamental questions about the lists. Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent. So are apparent alternatives.
“When you rely on a particular tactic, it starts to become the core of your strategy — you see the puff of smoke, and he’s gone,” said Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. “When we institutionalize certain things, including targeted killing, it does cross a threshold that makes it harder to cross back.”
For a decade, the dimensions of the drone campaign have been driven by short-term objectives: the degradation of al-Qaeda and the prevention of a follow-on, large-scale attack on American soil.
Side effects are more difficult to measure — including the extent to which strikes breed more enemies of the United States — but could be more consequential if the campaign continues for 10 more years.
“We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite,” Pillar said. “We have to pay particular attention, maybe more than we collectively have so far, to the longer-term pros and cons to the methods we use.”
Obama administration officials at times have sought to trigger debate over how long the nation might employ the kill lists. But officials said the discussions became dead ends.
In one instance, Mullen, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, returned from Pakistan and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a “top 20” list?
The issue resurfaced after the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden. Seeking to repair a rift with Pakistan, Panetta, the CIA director, told Kayani and others that the United States had only a handful of targets left and would be able to wind down the drone campaign.
A senior aide to Panetta disputed this account, and said Panetta mentioned the shrinking target list during his trip to Islamabad but didn’t raise the prospect that drone strikes would end. Two former U.S. officials said the White House told Panetta to avoid even hinting at commitments the United States was not prepared to keep.
“We didn’t want to get into the business of limitless lists,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spent years overseeing the lists. “There is this apparatus created to deal with counterterrorism. It’s still useful. The question is: When will it stop being useful? I don’t know.”
Karen DeYoung, Craig Whitlock and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
And of course this is another one of those articles where our blow hard, crooked politicians and police give us the line of "Do as I say, not as I do"
Arizona AG cited in hit-run accident
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic - azcentral.com Wed Oct 24, 2012 5:52 PM
The accident was witnessed by two FBI special agents who were tailing Horne as part of an investigation into alleged campaign-finance violations. The FBI turned the information over to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Earlier this month, county officials referred the matter to the city of Phoenix.
The state’s top prosecutor issued a brief, written statement about the citation shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Trent Crump said detectives from the Vehicular Crimes Unit cited Horne Wednesday morning.
The citation was for one count of leaving the scene of a collision/unattended vehicle, a class three misdemeanor and the lowest-level misdemeanor offense. Crump said the ticket includes a court date and refers Horne to Phoenix Municipal Court.
“I first learned of my possible involvement in this incident several months ago, and requested from investigating authorities the name of the owner of the vehicle so I could immediately pay for any damage I may have caused,” the statement read. “For some unknown reason I received no response. Hopefully, I can now obtain this information or the owner will contact me so I can pay for any damage that I may have unknowingly caused.”
Phoenix police and city prosecutors have not released public records about the accident to The Republic.
Other public records obtained by the newspaper from the county attorney’s office detail the crash. Maricopa County Attorney's Detective Mark Stribling wrote an April 19 memo describing how FBI agents Brian Grehoski and Merv Mason watched the accident and the minutes leading up to it. Stribling wrote that agents saw Carmen Chenal, a longtime Horne confidante and employee, leave the Attorney General's Office during lunch hour, get into a vehicle and drive to a downtown Phoenix parking garage. Horne then left the office and drove his gold Jaguar into the same garage.
Horne and Chenal then left the garage, with Horne driving the vehicle originally driven by Chenal, Stribling wrote. Chenal was in the passenger seat.
“Horne was now wearing a baseball hat and he drove to Carmen's residence where Horne backed into a white Range Rover,” Stribling wrote. “Horne and Chenal then drove away, parked in a parking garage and both walked into residential area where Chenal lived.”
National Security
The Permanent War
Secret ops expand at U.S. base
Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations
By Craig Whitlock, Published: October 25
This is the third of three articles.
DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
This transcript recounts the moments before the crash of an armed drone in Djibouti on May 17, 2011. Four others have crashed since drone traffic was stepped up at the clandestine U.S. base.
Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.
Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.
The Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies.
Increasingly, the orders to find, track or kill those people are delivered to Camp Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, making it the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases.
Secrecy blankets most of the camp’s activities. The U.S. military rejected requests from The Washington Post to tour Lemonnier last month. Officials cited “operational security concerns,” although they have permitted journalists to visit in the past.
After a Post reporter showed up in Djibouti uninvited, the camp’s highest-ranking commander consented to an interview — on the condition that it take place away from the base, at Djibouti's lone luxury hotel. The commander, Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, answered some general queries but declined to comment on drone operations or missions related to Somalia or Yemen.
Despite the secrecy, thousands of pages of military records obtained by The Post — including construction blueprints, drone accident reports and internal planning memos — open a revealing window into Camp Lemonnier. None of the documents is classified and many were acquired via public-records requests.
Taken together, the previously undisclosed documents show how the Djibouti-based drone wars sharply escalated early last year after eight Predators arrived at Lemonnier. The records also chronicle the Pentagon’s ambitious plan to further intensify drone operations here in the coming months.
The documents point to the central role played by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which President Obama has repeatedly relied on to execute the nation’s most sensitive counterterrorism missions.
About 300 Special Operations personnel plan raids and coordinate drone flights from inside a high-security compound at Lemonnier that is dotted with satellite dishes and ringed by concertina wire. Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base.
Other counterterrorism work at Lemonnier is more overt. All told, about 3,200 U.S. troops, civilians and contractors are assigned to the camp, where they train foreign militaries, gather intelligence and dole out humanitarian aid across East Africa as part of a campaign to prevent extremists from taking root.
In Washington, the Obama administration has taken a series of steps to sustain the drone campaign for another decade, developing an elaborate new targeting database, called the “disposition matrix,” and a classified “playbook” to spell out how decisions on targeted killing are made.
Djibouti is the clearest example of how the United States is laying the groundwork to carry out these operations overseas. For the past decade, the Pentagon has labeled Lemonnier an “expeditionary,” or temporary, camp. But it is now hardening into the U.S. military’s first permanent drone war base.
Centerpiece base
In August, the Defense Department delivered a master plan to Congress detailing how the camp will be used over the next quarter-century. About $1.4 billion in construction projects are on the drawing board, including a huge new compound that could house up to 1,100 Special Operations forces, more than triple the current number.
Drones will continue to be in the forefront. In response to written questions from The Post, the U.S. military confirmed publicly for the first time the presence of remotely piloted aircraft — military parlance for drones — at Camp Lemonnier and said they support “a wide variety of regional security missions.”
Intelligence collected from drone and other surveillance missions “is used to develop a full picture of the activities of violent extremist organizations and other activities of interest,” Africa Command, the arm of the U.S. military that oversees the camp, said in a statement. “However, operational security considerations prevent us from commenting on specific missions.”
For nearly a decade, the United States flew drones from Lemonnier only rarely, starting with a 2002 strike in Yemen that killed a suspected ringleader of the attack on the USS Cole.
That swiftly changed in 2010, however, after al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen attempted to bomb two U.S.-bound airliners and jihadists in Somalia separately consolidated their hold on that country. Late that year, records show, the Pentagon dispatched eight unmanned MQ-1B Predator aircraft to Djibouti and turned Lemonnier into a full-time drone base.
The impact was apparent months later: JSOC drones from Djibouti and CIA Predators from a secret base on the Arabian Peninsula converged over Yemen and killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric and prominent al-Qaeda member.
Today, Camp Lemonnier is the centerpiece of an expanding constellation of half a dozen U.S. drone and surveillance bases in Africa, created to combat a new generation of terrorist groups across the continent, from Mali to Libya to the Central African Republic. The U.S. military also flies drones from small civilian airports in Ethiopia and the Seychelles, but those operations pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Djibouti.
Lemonnier also has become a hub for conventional aircraft. In October 2011, the military boosted the airpower at the base by deploying a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets, which can fly faster and carry more munitions than Predators.
In its written responses, Africa Command confirmed the warplanes’ presence but declined to answer questions about their mission. Two former U.S. defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the F-15s are flying combat sorties over Yemen, an undeclared development in the growing war against al-Qaeda forces there.
The drones and other military aircraft have crowded the skies over the Horn of Africa so much that the risk of an aviation disaster has soared.
Since January 2011, Air Force records show, five Predators armed with Hellfire missiles crashed after taking off from Lemonnier, including one drone that plummeted to the ground in a residential area of Djibouti City. No injuries were reported but four of the drones were destroyed.
Predator drones in particular are more prone to mishaps than manned aircraft, Air Force statistics show. But the accidents rarely draw public attention because there are no pilots or passengers.
As the pace of drone operations has intensified in Djibouti, Air Force mechanics have reported mysterious incidents in which the airborne robots went haywire.
In March 2011, a Predator parked at the camp started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed. Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the “brains” of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem.
“After that whole starting-itself incident, we were fairly wary of the aircraft and watched it pretty closely,” an unnamed Air Force squadron commander testified to an investigative board, according to a transcript. “Right now, I still think the software is not good.”
Prime location
Djibouti is an impoverished former French colony with fewer than 1 million people, scarce natural resources and miserably hot weather.
But as far as the U.S. military is concerned, the country's strategic value is unparalleled. Sandwiched between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Camp Lemonnier enables U.S. aircraft to reach hot spots such as Yemen or Somalia in minutes. Djibouti’s port also offers easy access to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
“This is not an outpost in the middle of nowhere that is of marginal interest,” said Amanda J. Dory, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for Africa. “This is a very important location in terms of U.S. interests, in terms of freedom of navigation, when it comes to power projection.”
The U.S. military pays $38 million a year to lease Camp Lemonnier from the Djiboutian government. The base rolls across flat, sandy terrain on the edge of Djibouti City, a somnolent capital with eerily empty streets. During the day, many people stay indoors to avoid the heat and to chew khat, a mildly intoxicating plant that is popular in the region.
Hemmed in by the sea and residential areas, Camp Lemonnier’s primary shortcoming is that it has no space to expand. It is forced to share a single runway with Djibouti’s only international airport, as well as an adjoining French military base and the tiny Djiboutian armed forces.
Passengers arriving on commercial flights — there are about eight per day — can occasionally spy a Predator drone preparing for a mission. In between flights, the unmanned aircraft park under portable, fabric-covered hangars to shield them from the wind and curious eyes.
Behind the perimeter fence, construction crews are rebuilding the base to better accommodate the influx of drones. Glimpses of the secret operations can be found in an assortment of little-noticed Pentagon memoranda submitted to Congress.
Last month, for example, the Defense Department awarded a $62 million contract to build an airport taxiway extension to handle increased drone traffic at Lemonnier, an ammunition storage site and a combat-loading area for bombs and missiles.
In an Aug. 20 letter to Congress explaining the emergency contract, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said that 16 drones and four fighter jets take off or land at the Djibouti airfield each day, on average. Those operations are expected to increase, he added, without giving details.
In a separate letter to Congress, Carter said Camp Lemonnier is running out of space to park its drones, which he referred to as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), and other planes. “The recent addition of fighters and RPAs has exacerbated the situation, causing mission delays,” he said.
Carter’s letters revealed that the drones and fighter aircraft at the base support three classified military operations, code-named Copper Dune, Jupiter Garret and Octave Shield.
Copper Dune is the name of the military’s counterterrorism operations in Yemen. Africa Command said it could not provide information about Jupiter Garret and Octave Shield, citing secrecy restrictions. The code names are unclassified.
The military often assigns similar names to related missions. Octave Fusion was the code name for a Navy SEAL-led operation in Somalia that rescued an American and a Danish hostage on Jan. 24.
Spilled secrets
Another window into the Djibouti drone operations can be found in U.S. Air Force safety records.
Whenever a military aircraft is involved in a mishap, the Air Force appoints an Accident Investigation Board to determine the cause. Although the reports focus on technical questions, supplementary documents make it possible to re-create a narrative of what happened in the hours leading up to a crash.
Air Force officers investigating the crash of a Predator on May 17, 2011, found that things started to go awry at Camp Lemonnier late that night when a man known as Frog emerged from the Special Operations compound.
The camp’s main power supply had failed and the phone lines were down. So Frog walked over to the flight line to deliver some important news to the Predator ground crew on duty, according to the investigators’ files, which were obtained by The Post as part of a public-records request.
“Frog” was the alias chosen by a major assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command. At Lemonnier, he belonged to a special collection of Navy SEALs, Delta Force soldiers, Air Force commandos and Marines known simply as “the task force.”
JSOC commandos spend their days and nights inside their compound as they plot raids against terrorist camps and pirate hideouts. Everybody on the base is aware of what they do, but the topic is taboo. “I can’t acknowledge the task force,” said Baker, the Army general and highest-ranking commander at Lemonnier.
Frog coordinated Predator hunts. He did not reveal his real name to anyone without a need to know, not even the ground-crew supervisors and operators and mechanics who cared for the Predators. The only contact came when Frog or his friends occasionally called from their compound to say it was time to ready a drone for takeoff or to prepare for a landing.
Information about each Predator mission was kept so tightly compartmentalized that the ground crews were ignorant of the drones’ targets and destinations. All they knew was that most of their Predators eventually came back, usually 20 or 22 hours later, earlier if something went awry.
On this particular night, Frog informed the crew that his Predator was returning unexpectedly, 17 hours into the flight, because of a slow oil leak.
It was not an emergency. But as the drone descended toward Djibouti City it entered a low-hanging cloud that obscured its camera sensor. Making matters worse, the GPS malfunctioned and gave incorrect altitude readings.
The crew operating the drone was flying blind. It guided the Predator on a “dangerously low glidepath,” Air Force investigators concluded, and crashed the remote-controlled plane 2.7 miles short of the runway.
The site was in a residential area and fire trucks rushed to the scene. The drone had crashed in a vacant lot and its single Hellfire missile had not detonated.
The Predator splintered apart and was a total loss. With a $3 million price tag, it had cost less than one-tenth the price of an F-15 Strike Eagle.
But in terms of spilling secrets, the damage was severe. Word spread quickly about the mysterious insect-shaped plane that had dropped from the sky. Hundreds of Djiboutians gathered and gawked at the wreckage for hours until the U.S. military arrived to retrieve the pieces.
One secret that survived, however, was Frog’s identity. The official Air Force panel assigned to investigate the Predator accident couldn’t determine his real name, much less track him down for questioning.
“Who is Frog?” one investigator demanded weeks later while interrogating a ground crew member, according to a transcript. “I’m sorry, I was just getting more explanation as to who Frog — is that a person? Or is that like a position?”
The crew member explained that Frog was a liaison officer from the task force. “He’s a Pred guy,” he shrugged. “I actually don’t know his last name.”
The accident triggered alarms at the upper echelons of the Air Force because it was the fourth drone in four months from Camp Lemonnier to crash.
Ten days earlier, on May 7, 2011, a drone carrying a Hellfire missile had an electrical malfunction shortly after it entered Yemeni airspace, according to an Air Force investigative report. The Predator turned back toward Djibouti. About one mile offshore, it rolled uncontrollably to the right, then back to the left before flipping belly up and hurtling into the sea.
“I’ve never seen a Predator do that before in my life, except in videos of other crashes,” a sensor operator from the ground crew told investigators, according to a transcript. “I’m just glad we landed it in the ocean and not someplace else.”
Flying every sortie
The remote-control drones in Djibouti are flown, via satellite link, by pilots 8,000 miles away in the United States, sitting at consoles in air-conditioned quarters at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.
At Camp Lemonnier, conditions are much less pleasant for the Air Force ground crews that launch, recover and fix the drones.
In late 2010, after military cargo planes transported the fleet of eight Predators to Djibouti, airmen from the 60th Air Force Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron unpacked the drones from their crates and assembled them.
Soon after, without warning, a microburst storm with 80-mph winds struck the camp.
The 87-member squadron scrambled to secure the Predators and other exposed aircraft. They managed to save more than half of the “high-value, Remotely Piloted Aircraft assets from destruction, and most importantly, prevented injury and any loss of life,” according to a brief account published in Combat Edge, an Air Force safety magazine.
Even normal weather conditions could be brutal, with summertime temperatures reaching 120 degrees on top of 80 percent humidity.
“Our war reserve air conditioners literally short-circuited in the vain attempt to cool the tents in which we worked,” recalled Lt. Col. Thomas McCurley, the squadron commander. “Our small group of security forces personnel guarded the compound, flight line and other allied assets at posts exposed to the elements with no air conditioning at all.”
McCurley’s rare public account of the squadron’s activities came in June, when the Air Force awarded him a Bronze Star. At the ceremony, he avoided any explicit mention of the Predators or Camp Lemonnier. But his narrative matched what is known about the squadron’s deployment to Djibouti.
“Our greatest accomplishment was that we flew every single sortie the Air Force asked us to fly, despite the challenges we encountered,” he said. “We were an integral part in taking down some very important targets, which means a lot to me.”
He did not mention it, but the unit had gotten into the spirit of its mission by designing a uniform patch emblazoned with a skull, crossbones and a suitable nickname: “East Africa Air Pirates.”
The Air Force denied a request from The Post to interview McCurley.
Increased traffic
The frequency of U.S. military flights from Djibouti has soared, overwhelming air-traffic controllers and making the skies more dangerous.
The number of takeoffs and landings each month has more than doubled, reaching a peak of 1,666 in July compared with a monthly average of 768 two years ago, according to air-traffic statistics disclosed in Defense Department contracting documents.
Drones now account for about 30 percent of daily U.S. military flight operations at Lemonnier, according to a Post analysis.
The increased activity has meant more mishaps. Last year, drones were involved in “a string of near mid-air collisions” with NATO planes off the Horn of Africa, according to a brief safety alert published in Combat Edge magazine.
Drones also pose an aviation risk next door in Somalia. Over the past year, remote-controlled aircraft have plunged into a refugee camp, flown perilously close to a fuel dump and almost collided with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital, according to a United Nations report.
Manned planes are crashing, too. An Air Force U-28A surveillance plane crashed five miles from Camp Lemonnier while returning from a secret mission on Feb. 18, killing the four-person crew. An Air Force investigation attributed the accident to “unrecognized spatial disorientation” on the part of the crew, which ignored sensor warnings that it was flying too close to the ground.
Baker, the two-star commander at Lemonnier, played down the crashes and near-misses. He said safety had improved since he arrived in Djibouti in May.
“We’ve dramatically reduced any incidents of concern, certainly since I’ve been here,” he said.
Last month, the Defense Department awarded a $7 million contract to retrain beleaguered air-traffic controllers at Ambouli International Airport and improve their English skills.
The Djiboutian controllers handle all civilian and U.S. military aircraft. But they are “undermanned” and “over tasked due to the recent rapid increase in U.S. military flights,” according to the contract. It also states that the controllers and the airport are not in compliance with international aviation standards.
Resolving those deficiencies may not be sufficient. Records show the U.S. military is also scrambling for an alternative place for its planes to land in an emergency.
Last month, it awarded a contract to install portable lighting at the only backup site available: a tiny, makeshift airstrip in the Djiboutian desert, several miles from Lemonnier.
A CIA veteran transforms U.S. counterterrorism policy
By Karen DeYoung, Published: October 24
This is the second of three articles.
In his windowless White House office, presidential counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is compiling the rules for a war the Obama administration believes will far outlast its own time in office, whether that is just a few more months or four more years.
The “playbook,” as Brennan calls it, will lay out the administration’s evolving procedures for the targeted killings that have come to define its fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. It will cover the selection and approval of targets from the “disposition matrix,” the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted, and the legal authorities the administration thinks sanction its actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.
“What we’re trying to do right now is to have a set of standards, a set of criteria, and have a decision-making process that will govern our counterterrorism actions — we’re talking about direct action, lethal action — so that irrespective of the venue where they’re taking place, we have a high confidence that they’re being done for the right reasons in the right way,” Brennan said in a lengthy interview at the end of August.
A burly 25-year CIA veteran with a stern public demeanor, Brennan is the principal architect of a policy that has transformed counterterrorism from a conventional fight centered in Afghanistan to a high-tech global effort to track down and eliminate perceived enemies one by one.
What was once a disparate collection of tactics — drone strikes by the CIA and the military, overhead surveillance, deployment of small Special Forces ground units at far-flung bases, and distribution of military and economic aid to threatened governments — has become a White House-centered strategy with Brennan at its core.
Four years ago, Brennan felt compelled to withdraw from consideration as President Obama’s first CIA director because of what he regarded as unfair criticism of his role in counterterrorism practices as an intelligence official during the George W. Bush administration. Instead, he stepped into a job in the Obama administration with greater responsibility and influence.
Brennan is leading efforts to curtail the CIA’s primary responsibility for targeted killings. Over opposition from the agency, he has argued that it should focus on intelligence activities and leave lethal action to its more traditional home in the military, where the law requires greater transparency. Still, during Brennan’s tenure, the CIA has carried out hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and opened a new base for armed drones in the Arabian Peninsula.
Although he insists that all agencies have the opportunity to weigh in on decisions, making differing perspectives available to the Oval Office, Brennan wields enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones, the war’s signature weapon.
When operations are proposed in Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere, it is Brennan alone who takes the recommendations to Obama for a final sign-off.
As the war against al-Qaeda and related groups moves to new locations and new threats, Brennan and other senior officials describe the playbook as an effort to constrain the deployment of drones by future administrations as much as it provides a framework for their expanded use in what has become the United States’ permanent war.
“This needs to be sustainable,” one senior administration official said, “and we need to think of it in ways that contemplate other people sitting in all the chairs around the table.”
There is widespread agreement that Obama and Brennan, one of the president’s most trusted aides, are like-minded on counterterrorism policy.
“Ever since the first couple of months, I felt there was a real similarity of views that gave me a sense of comfort,” Brennan said. “I don’t think we’ve had a disagreement.”
But the concentration of power in one person, who is unelected and unconfirmed by Congress, does not sit well with critics.
To many in the international legal community and among human rights and civil liberties activists, Brennan runs a policy so secret that it is impossible for outsiders to judge whether it complies with the laws of war or U.S. values — or even determine the total number of people killed.
“Brennan says the administration is committed to ‘greater transparency,’ ” Human Rights Watch said in response to a speech he gave in May about drones. But despite “administration assertions that ‘innocent civilians’ have not been injured or killed, except in the ‘rarest of circumstances,’ there has been no clear accounting of civilian loss or opportunity to meaningfully examine the administration’s assertions.”
Although outsiders have criticized the policy itself, some inside the administration take issue with how Brennan has run it. One former senior counterterrorism official described Brennan as the “single point of failure” in the strategy, saying he controls too much and delegates too little.
A former top Defense Department official sounded a similar note. “He holds his cards incredibly close,” he said. “If I ask for the right one to be seen, he’ll show it to me. But he’s not going to show me everything he’s got in his hand.”
Michael E. Leiter, who headed the National Counterterrorism Center until mid-2011, described Brennan as a forceful leader and “a critical player in getting this president comfortable with the tools of the trade.”
Leiter said that he and Brennan “disagreed not infrequently” on fleeting issues, including interpretations of a piece of intelligence or how to respond to a specific threat. But there was a more significant issue: Leiter said Brennan was less focused on root causes of radicalization, in part because of how Brennan and the White House defined his job.
Leiter was one of the few people who allowed his name to be used among the nearly dozen current and former senior national security officials interviewed for this article. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity under restrictions imposed by the administration or because they were not authorized to discuss certain issues.
For each of Brennan’s critics, there are many associates who use the words “moral compass” to describe his role in the White House. It is Brennan, they say, who questions the justification for each drone attack, who often dials back what he considers excessive zeal by the CIA and the military, and who stands up for diplomatic and economic assistance components in the overall strategy.
Brennan’s bedrock belief in a “just war,” they said, is tempered by his deep knowledge of the Middle East, Islam and the CIA, and the critical thinking forged during a classic Jesuit education.
Some White House aides describe him as a nearly priest-like presence in their midst, with a moral depth leavened by a dry Irish wit.
One CIA colleague, former general counsel John Rizzo, recalled his rectitude surfacing in unexpected ways. Brennan once questioned Rizzo’s use of the “BCC” function in the agency’s e-mail system to send a blind copy of a message to a third party without the primary recipient’s knowledge.
“He wasn’t joking,” Rizzo said. “He regarded that as underhanded.”
Brennan, 57, was born in the gritty New Jersey town of North Bergen, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. His Irish-immigrant parents, now in their early 90s, were strict and devout Catholics, traits his brother Tom said Brennan embodied from an early age. “It was almost like I had two fathers,” Tom Brennan said.
John Brennan’s formative experiences at Fordham University, where he earned a degree in political science, included a summer in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, and a junior year at the American University in Cairo, where he studied Arabic and the region that would dominate his intelligence career and greatly influence his White House tenure.
In 1980, soon after receiving a master’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin, Brennan answered a CIA recruitment ad in a newspaper. By the middle of the decade, he had spent two years in Saudi Arabia and was among the agency’s leading Middle Eastern analysts.
“He was probably the hardest-working human being I ever encountered,” said a former senior CIA official who worked for Brennan on the Middle East desk. Brennan, he said, was regarded as insightful, even imaginative, but had a seriousness that set him apart.
In 1999, after a second tour in Saudi Arabia as CIA station chief, he returned to headquarters as chief of staff for then-Director George J. Tenet. In 2001, he became deputy executive director, just months before a team of al-Qaeda operatives — most of them from Saudi Arabia — used four hijacked U.S. airliners to kill nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11.
‘I . . . do what I think is right’
Brennan’s belief in his competence and probity has sometimes led to political blind spots. Tenet tapped him in 2003 to build the new CIA-based Terrorist Threat Integration Center to bridge pre-Sept. 11 intelligence gaps. But Brennan was bypassed by the Bush administration a year later for two key jobs — head of the National Counterterrorism Center and deputy to the new director of national intelligence — largely because of his criticism of the Iraq war.
As a private citizen after leaving government, Brennan spoke publicly about counterterrorism controversies of the day. He defended the CIA’s rendition of suspected terrorists as “an absolutely vital tool” but described waterboarding as within “the classic definition of torture.” Brennan also criticized the military as moving too far into traditional intelligence spheres.
His career in government appeared to be over until he was invited in late 2007 to join the nascent presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Although Obama and Brennan did not meet until after the election, their first conversation during the transition revealed profound harmony on issues of intelligence and what the president-elect called the “war against al-Qaeda.”
But when Brennan’s name circulated as Obama’s choice to head the CIA, he again came under political fire — this time from liberals who accused him of complicity in the agency’s use of brutal interrogation measures under Bush. Spooked by the criticism, Obama quickly backtracked and Brennan withdrew.
“It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding,” he wrote in an angry withdrawal letter released to the media.
Several former intelligence colleagues said that, although Brennan had criticized the CIA interrogation methods after he left the government, they could not recall him doing so as a senior executive at the agency.
Brennan was given responsibility in the White House for counterterrorism and homeland security, a position that required no Senate confirmation and had no well-defined duties. At the outset, colleagues said they wondered what his job would be.
But to a young administration new to the secret details of national security threats and responsibilities, Brennan was a godsend.
And for the man passed over for other posts, it was vindication. “I’ve been crucified by the left and the right, equally so,” and rejected by the Bush administration “because I was not seen as someone who was a team player,” Brennan said in the interview.
“I’m probably not a team player here, either,” he said of the Obama administration. “I tend to do what I think is right. But I find much more comfort, I guess, in the views and values of this president.”
Brennan and others on the inside found that Obama, hailed as a peacemaker by the left and criticized by the right as a naive pacifist, was willing to move far more aggressively than Bush against perceived extremists.
Yemen is a ‘model’
From the outset, Brennan expressed concern about the spread of al-Qaeda beyond South Asia, particularly to Yemen, according to administration officials involved in the early talks.
U.S. counterterrorism policy had long been concentrated on Pakistan, where the Bush administration had launched sporadic CIA drone attacks against senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Within two years, Obama had more than tripled the number of strikes in Pakistan, from 36 in 2008 to 122 in 2010, according to the New America Foundation.
Eventually, Obama and Brennan decided the program was getting out of hand. High-value targets were becoming elusive, accusations of civilian deaths were rising, and strikes were increasingly directed toward what the angry Pakistanis called mere “foot soldiers.”
But with Pakistan’s adamant refusal to allow U.S. military operations on its soil, taking what was considered a highly successful program out of CIA hands was viewed as counterproductive and too complicated. Although CIA strikes in other countries and military strikes outside Afghanistan require Obama’s approval, the agency has standing permission to attack targets on an approved list in Pakistan without asking the White House.
Although the administration has “wrestled with” the Pakistan program, it was always considered an initiative of the previous administration, a senior official said. In Yemen, the Obama team began to build its own counterterrorism architecture.
The turning point came on Christmas Day in 2009, when a Nigerian trained by Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group, penetrated post-Sept. 11 defenses and nearly detonated a bomb aboard a Detroit-bound airliner.
In the wake of the failed attack, Brennan “got more into tactical issues,” said Leiter, the former NCTC head. “He dug into more operational stuff than he had before.”
Brennan made frequent visits to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, its closest neighbor and the dominant regional power. He used his longtime contacts in the region to cement a joint U.S.-Saudi policy that would ultimately — with the help of Yemen’s Arab Spring revolt — bring a more cooperative government to power. He often spoke of the need to address “upstream” problems of poverty and poor governance that led to “downstream” radicalization, and pushed for economic aid to buttress a growing military and intelligence presence.
Yemen quickly became the place where the United States would “get ahead of the curve” on terrorism that had become so difficult to round in Pakistan, one official said. As intelligence and military training programs were expanded, the military attacked AQAP targets in Yemen and neighboring Somalia using both fixed-wing aircraft and drones launched from a base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.
Despite Brennan’s professed dismay at the transformation of the CIA into a paramilitary entity with killing authority, the agency was authorized to operate its own armed aircraft out of a new base in the Arabian Peninsula.
Beginning in 2011, discussions on targeting, strikes and intelligence that had been coordinated by a committee set up by Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were gradually drawn into the White House under Brennan, who, according to several accounts, struggled to pare back increasingly expansive target lists in Yemen. At one meeting last year, one senior official said, Obama weighed in to warn that Yemen was not Afghanistan, and that “we are not going to war in Yemen.”
Today, Brennan said, “there are aspects of the Yemen program that I think are a true model of what I think the U.S. counterterrorism community should be doing” as it tracks the spread of al-Qaeda allies across Northern Africa.
As targets move to different locations, and new threats “to U.S. interests and to U.S. persons and property” are identified in Africa and elsewhere, Brennan described a step-by-step program of escalation. “First and foremost, I would want to work through local authorities and see whether or not we can provide them the intelligence, and maybe even give them some enhanced capability, to take action to bring that person to justice,” he said.
For those governments that are “unwilling or unable” to act, he said, “then we have an obligation as a government to protect our people, and if we need then to take action ourselves . . . we look at what those options are as well.”
In late August, Brennan said he saw no need “to go forward with some kind of kinetic action in places like Mali,” where al-Qaeda allies have seized control of a broad swath of territory. Since then, Brennan and other officials have begun to compare the situation in Mali to Somalia, where drone and other air attacks have supplemented a U.S.-backed African military force.
An opaque process
Where Obama and Brennan envision a standardized counterterrorism program bound by domestic and international law, some others see a secretive killing machine of questionable legality and limitless expansion.
Many civil libertarians and human rights experts disdain claims by Brennan and others that the drone program has become increasingly transparent, noting that the administration has yet to provide even minimal details about targeting decisions or to take responsibility for the vast majority of attacks.
“For more than two years, senior officials have been making claims about the program both on the record and off. They’ve claimed that the program is effective, lawful and closely supervised,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said last month in appealing repeated court refusals to force the administration to release more information.
Some critics have described it as immoral, rejecting the administration’s claims that few civilians have been among the nearly 3,000 people estimated to have been killed in drone attacks. There is ample evidence in Pakistan that the more than 300 strikes launched under Obama have helped turn the vast majority of the population vehemently against the United States.
None of the United States’ chief allies has publicly supported the targeted killings; many of them privately question the administration’s claim that it comports with international law and worry about the precedent it sets for others who inevitably will acquire the same technology.
To the extent that it aspires to make the program’s standards and processes more visible, the playbook has been a source of friction inside the administration. “Other than the State Department, there are not a lot of advocates for transparency,” one official said. Some officials expressed concern that the playbook has become a “default” option for counterterrorism.
The CIA, which declined to comment for this article, is said to oppose codifying procedures that might lock it into roles it cannot expand or maneuver around in the future. Directors at most national security agencies agree on targeting rules that are already in place, an official close to Brennan said. But “when it’s written down on paper, institutions may look at it in a different way.”
The CIA, which is preparing a proposal to increase its drone fleet, considers Brennan “a rein, a constrainer. He is using his intimate knowledge of intelligence and the process to pick apart their arguments that might be expansionary,” a senior official outside the White House said.
Two administration officials said that CIA drones were responsible for two of the most controversial attacks in Yemen in 2011 — one that killed American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a prominent figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and a second a few days later that killed his 16-year-old son, also an American citizen. One of the officials called the second attack “an outrageous mistake. . . . They were going after the guy sitting next to him.”
Both operations remain secret and unacknowledged, because of what officials said were covert-
action rules that tied their hands when it came to providing information.
Some intelligence officials said Brennan has made little substantive effort to shift more responsibility to the military. But Brennan and others described a future in which the CIA is eased out of the clandestine-killing business, and said the process will become more transparent under Defense Department oversight and disclosure rules.
“Deniable missions” are not the military norm, one official said.
Said Brennan: “I think the president always needs the ability to do things under his chief executive powers and authorities, to include covert action.” But, he added, “I think the rule should be that if we’re going to take actions overseas that result in the deaths of people, the United States should take responsibility for that.”
One official said that “for a guy whose reputation is focused on how tough he is on counterterrorism,” Brennan is “more focused than anybody in the government on the legal, ethical and transparency questions associated with all this.” By drawing so much decision-making directly into his own office, said another, he has “forced a much better process at the CIA and the Defense Department.”
Even if Obama is reelected, Brennan may not stay for another term. That means someone else is likely to be interpreting his playbook.
“Do I want this system to last forever?” a senior official said. “No. Do I think it’s the best system for now? Yes.”
“What is scary,” he concluded, “is the apparatus set up without John to run it.”
Greg Miller and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
From this article where the cops are using a sharpshooter in a helicopter to murder suspected drug smugglers in Texas I suspect the day when they will be using drones to do the same thing isn't far away.
Trooper fired from chopper to stop truck, kills 2
By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN and JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
Associated Press
LA JOYA, Texas (AP) — A Texas state trooper who fired on a pickup truck from a helicopter and killed two illegal immigrants during a chase through the desert was trying to disable the vehicle and suspected it was being used to smuggle drugs, authorities said Friday.
The disclosure came a day after the incident that left two Guatemalan nationals dead on an isolated gravel road near the town of La Joya, just north of the Mexico border.
State game wardens were the first to encounter the truck Thursday. After the driver refused to stop, they radioed for help and state police responded, according to Parks and Wildlife Department spokesman Mike Cox.
When the helicopter with a sharpshooter arrived, officers concluded that the truck appeared to be carrying a "typical covered drug load" on its bed and was travelling at reckless speeds, police said.
After the shots were fired and the truck's tires blown out, the driver lost control and crashed into a ditch. State police said a preliminary investigation revealed that the shots fired from the helicopter struck the vehicle's occupants.
Eight people who were in the truck were arrested. At least seven of them were also from Guatemala. No drugs were found.
The Guatemalan consul in McAllen, Alba Caceres, told The Associated Press that the surviving witnesses told her "one died immediately, the other was apparently taken to a hospital and died on the way."
The sharpshooter was placed on administrative leave, a standard procedure after such incidents.
An expert on police chases said the decision to fire on the truck was "a reckless act" that served "no legitimate law enforcement purpose."
"In 25 years following police pursuits, I hadn't seen a situation where an officer shot a speeding vehicle from a helicopter," said Geoffrey Alpert, professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. Such action would be reasonable only if "you know for sure the person driving the car deserves to die and that there are no other occupants."
In general, he said, law enforcement agencies allow the use of deadly force only when the car is being used as a weapon, not "just on a hunch," Alpert added.
The Texas Department of Public Safety referred questions about its policy governing the use of deadly force to its general manual, which says troopers are allowed to use such force when defending themselves or someone else from serious harm or death. Shooting at vehicles is justified to disable a vehicle or when deadly force is deemed necessary.
Other law enforcement agencies that patrol the border say they have similar limits on the practice.
For instance, federal Customs and Borders Protection agents "are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law enforcement partners and innocent third parties," agency spokesman Doug Mosier said.
But a report presented Thursday to the United Nations by the American Civil Liberties Union said shootings and excessive force by Customs and Border Protection agents on the border have left at least 20 individuals dead or seriously hurt since January 2010.
Of those, eight cases involved agents responding to reports of people throwing rocks. Six involved people killed while standing on the Mexican side of the border.
In recent years, Texas state police have increased their presence in the border area, deploying more agents, more helicopters and more boats to patrol the Rio Grande.
Troopers are regularly involved in high-speed pursuits, often chasing drug smugglers into the river and back to Mexico.
Agency Director Stephen McCraw has said state police were pushed into that role because the federal government's efforts to secure the border have been insufficient.
Diplomats quickly began their own investigation into the chase.
The head of the Guatemalan Consulate in McAllen said she is demanding federal and state authorities provide an explanation.
"I am baffled. I can't understand how this could happen," Caceres said. "I understand that the agents are doing their job, that they are protecting their border. But if there is someone who is responsible for this, he has to pay."
The Guatemalans started their journey 19 days ago near Guatemala City, with plans to stay with friends and relatives in New York, New Jersey and Houston, she said.
They were covered with a tarp, but as the car sped away from the game warden and the helicopter, the men "were having lots of trouble holding on to that tarp, Caceres said. "They must have seen them."
Supreme Court to revisit use of dogs as basis for drug searches
By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
October 31, 2012
WASHINGTON — Researchers at UC Davis set up a simple experiment to test police dogs and their fabled ability to detect drugs. They told 18 police dog handlers they had hidden small amounts of illegal drugs in four rooms of a church.
Over two days of testing, the drug-sniffing dogs alerted their handlers repeatedly and in every room — 225 times in all. And they were twice as likely to alert on spots marked with red construction paper that the handlers had been told would indicate drugs.
But in fact, no drugs were in any of the rooms, suggesting the "handler's beliefs" and their "hidden cues" may trigger the dog to alert on a target of suspicion, the researchers said.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will revisit the constitutionality of using police dogs to trigger searches of cars and homes in a pair of cases from Florida. The justices will decide whether the 4th Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches" requires the police to have more than an alert from a drug-sniffing dog before they open the trunk of a car or enter a home.
Nationwide, dogs are the leading weapon in the government's war on drugs. Florida alone has more than 1,000 K-9 units, and they were responsible for more than 130,000 arrests last year.
In the past, the high court has given the police a green light to conduct searches whenever a "well-trained narcotics detection dog" gives an alert. No one disputes that canines have an extraordinary ability to detect odors, and they can be invaluable in finding items such as hidden explosives or human remains.
But some experts in animal science are urging the justices to be cautious before allowing police dogs to serve as a substitute for search warrants.
Alerts from drug-detecting dogs "should be viewed with a healthy skepticism," said Auburn University professor Lawrence J. Myers, who has studied canines for decades. He said some dogs and their handlers were highly reliable, while others were not.
The UC Davis study "got an enormous reaction in the field," he said, because it showed the handlers, not the dogs, may be responsible for some of the alerts. "This is a major problem, and we've known it for a long time. The behavior of the handler affects the behavior of the animal," he said.
But Florida prosecutors and police dog handlers say that evidence of a dog's good training and certification should be enough to demonstrate their reliability. "If a dog is tested in a controlled setting, you know if the dog is wrong or right," said Arthur Daus, a lawyer for the National Police Canine Assn.
Last year, the Chicago Tribune reported on data from several suburban police districts, which found only 44% of the car searches that were triggered by an alert from sniffer dogs resulted in the discovery of drugs or drug paraphernalia in the vehicle.
Police officers usually discount these "false" alerts, suggesting they are probably triggered by "residual odors" in the vehicle. The dog may have detected the odor of marijuana or cocaine that had been kept in the trunk weeks before, they say.
But Myers said experiments in a controlled environment — like the church in the UC Davis study — also found some dogs and their handlers were wrong more often than right in detecting narcotics.
Last year, the Florida Supreme Court said it was not convinced drug-sniffing dogs were always reliable enough to justify searches of cars on the highway. "There is no uniform standard in this state or nationwide for acceptable level of training, testing or certification for drug-detection dogs," the state justices said. And the "potential for false alerts and for handler error" means that innocent motorists may be subjected to embarrassing searches, they said.
To justify a search that is triggered by a drug-sniffing dog, the police must furnish a trial judge with the canine's "field performance records, including any unverified alerts," as well as evidence of its training and certification, the state justices said.
The case to be heard Wednesday began when a police officer went on patrol near Tallahassee with "his K-9 partner Aldo," a German shepherd. The officer stopped a pickup with an expired tag. The nervous motorist, Clayton Harris, refused to permit a search of his truck.
After Aldo circled the vehicle and alerted next to a door, the officer said he had probable cause to search inside. He found a bag of pseudoephedrine pills, thousands of matches and other ingredients for making methamphetamine.
Harris pleaded no contest to the drug charges, but the state justices ruled the search of his truck was unconstitutional because the police had not furnished objective evidence of Aldo's reliability.
In a second case, the Florida court overturned the conviction of a Miami man for growing marijuana in his house. An officer had taken a drug-sniffing dog to the man's front porch, and the alert furnished the probable cause to obtain a search warrant.
However, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from Florida's attorney general in the cases, Florida vs. Harris and Florida vs. Jardines.
Kenneth Furton, a chemist at Florida International University in Miami, led a group of scientists who studied police dogs. He said it was not good enough to allow police agencies to test their own dogs.
A dog and his handler must be tested on multiple vehicles, and "they need to be correct nine out of 10 times," he said.
david.savage@latimes.com
Preckwinkle drops bullet tax, keeps gun tax
By Hal Dardick Tribune reporter
10:43 a.m. CDT, October 31, 2012
The compromise was negotiated over several days with Commissioners John Fritchey and Edwin Reyes, both Chicago Democrats, who had balked at the guns and ammo taxes.
In exchange for their support, Preckwinkle agreed to create a $2 million fund to combat gun violence. Fritchey had proposed dedicating $1.4 million to anti-gun violence efforts. She also agreed to exempt law-enforcement officers from having to pay the tax, which helped convince Reyes to support the plan.
An undetermined portion of the $2 million would be granted to “non-profits with a track record of effective violence prevention and community outreach.” About $100,000 would be used to crack down on illegal gun purchases.
An advisory board that will award the grants also would look at gun courts in other jurisdictions and come up with a recommendation for the county by July 1, Preckwinkle said.
Although Preckwinkle dropped immediate plans for the ammo tax of a nickel per bullet, she said the county will continue to look at the idea. As it was proposed, the taxes on some boxes of bullets would have been greater than the cost of the bullets themselves, Preckwinkle said.
The bullet tax was projected to raise $400,000 in revenue. The gun tax would raise $600,000, Budget Director Andrea Gibson said.
The revenue would help defray the cost of medical care for people who are shot and then treated at county-run, taxpayer subsidized Cook County Hospital. The hospital treats about 670 gunshot victims at year at an average cost of $52,000, Preckwinkle said.
hdardick@tribune.com
Sure the laws making drugs illegal are definitively a government welfare program for cops.
But the RICO laws which allows the police to steal all the assets of anybody they suspect of
"drug war" crimes are an even bigger government welfare program for cops.
Former North Chicago chief accused of stealing seized drug money
By Robert McCoppin Tribune reporter
4:29 p.m. CDT, October 30, 2012
A former North Chicago police chief was arrested and charged today with theft of more than $140,000 that had been seized from drug arrests, officials announced.
Former Chief Michael Newsome was accused of using the money to buy a new car and do home repairs on his kitchen, among other personal expenditures, Lake County Assistant State’s Attorney Steve Scheller said.
Newsome, who left office in February amid a public uproar over alleged police brutality within the department, was charged with an ongoing theft of more than $140,000 from April of 2011 through March 31 of this year, Scheller said.
Newsome, 51, was also charged with a separate count of theft of $500 to $10,000, stemming from an allegation that he withdrew an amount of money on May 4 of last year to pay for his children's school, authorities said.
Additionally, Newsome was charged with official misconduct and misapplication of funds, officials said.
Earlier this year, Mayor Leon Rockingham Jr. directed Newsome’s successor, Chief James Jackson, to review all internal police policies, according to a statement from the city. In doing so, Jackson discovered questionable withdrawals from the asset forfeiture account maintained by the police department. Money seized from drug arrests is deposited into that account.
After that discovery, the mayor directed the chief to notify the Lake County State’s Attorney’s office, which opened an investigation, resulting in today’s arrest. Newsome surrendered to officials this morning and was released after posting $25,000 bond, officials said.
In the press release, Rockingham said that if the charges are proven, it would be “an enormous betrayal of trust.”
rmccoppin@tribune.com
Battle Amnesty International Must Win
Posted on October 31, 2012 | Author: Nick Dranias
This past Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of secret warrantless dragnet surveillance of international electronic communications. Amnesty International, which often communicates with Americans who are residents of foreign countries, has challenged the secret surveillance law, known as “FISA,” by arguing that the Fourth Amendment was meant to bar such warrantless surveillance. Although the challenge involves national security issues, its ultimate outcome could have a direct impact on all types of laws that authorize the government to access the private information of its citizens.
Amnesty International and its allies have faced a serious obstacle in making their constitutional arguments. The Obama administration is using the same arguments the Bush Administration used, claiming that the only injury that can allow a lawsuit to move forward under the Fourth Amendment is proof that someone has actually suffered a loss of privacy from warrantless surveillance. This, of course, is a virtually insurmountable hurdle when the surveillance is conducted in secret. In response, Amnesty has claimed its injury is international travel costs that have been incurred because people must communicate in person, rather than using telephones or email.
But there is a better argument. It involves recognizing that the Fourth Amendment does not merely protect against invasions of privacy. The Fourth Amendment guarantees “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” As such, the loss of “security” in our property and private communications is the primary injury that the Fourth Amendment seeks to prevent.
That injury—insecurity in property and private communications—is clear and concrete when the federal government dragoons internet servers to intercept and pierce the private communications of Americans. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will stand with Amnesty International. A win in this case is important to defend the liberties of Americans at home and abroad.
People who receive the death penalty routinely spend 20+ years in prison before being executed.
The people what benefit hugely from this are the prosecutors, judges, and public defenders who are paid big bucks to work them thru the mandatory appeals process.
This article says California has spent about $4 billion to execute 13 inmates. That is a cost of $307 million per execution. I suspect money paid to the the judges, prosecutors and public defenders involved in these state sponsored murders ate up a large amount of those costs.
And of course that doesn't even address the issue that innocent people have been executed by the government and that more innocent people will be murdered by the government as long as the death penalty exists.
Foes say death penalty is too costly
By Paul Elias Associated Press Fri Nov 2, 2012 12:08 AM
SAN FRANCISCO -- Death penalty opponents in California are trying a new argument this year: Abolish capital punishment because the cash-strapped state can’t afford it.
Voters in the state with the nation’s largest death row will decide Tuesday whether to repeal the death penalty. Proponents of Proposition 34 say incarceration and litigation costs are too high for too little return.
California has spent about $4 billion since capital punishment resumed in 1977, yet just 13 inmates have been put to death.
An independent analysis says the state would save between $100 million and $130 million a year by converting death sentences to life without parole.
“The death penalty is a giant rathole where so much of California’s budget is thrown with no discernible benefit,” said Diane Wilson, whose husband, a police officer, was killed by a man now on death row.
A supporter of Proposition 34, she said the death sentence given to her husband’s killer “didn’t change anything. I still don’t have a husband, and my children and family are devastated.”
Opponents say the argument is merely a smoke screen by opponents of capital punishment.
“He deserves the ultimate punishment for what he did to my daughter,” said Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was abducted, raped and killed by Richard Allen Davis in 1993.
Klaas, an outspoken Proposition 34 opponent, said that rather than do away with the death penalty, the appeals process should be streamlined.
Three former California governors have spoken out against the initiative.
One, Republican Pete Wilson, co-wrote the official argument that says the groups pushing Proposition 34 are most responsible for the high costs of housing death row inmates and paying for their appeals.
It's time to boot Sheriff Joe Arpaio out of office.
Sheriff Joe is not only the worst Sheriff in Maricopa County,
Sheriff Joe is the worst sheriff in the world!
According to this article Scottsdale Representative David Burnell Smith was busted for drunken driving.
David Burnell Smith sounds like a royal government ruler and tied to claim legislative immunity when he was popped.
Arizona lawmaker arrested on DUI charge
By Ashton Buccola The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Nov 2, 2012 11:49 PM
Smith had a blood-alcohol level of 0.137 percent, police said. The legal limit is 0.08 percent.
Smith, a Republican who represents northeast Phoenix, Carefree, Cave Creek and northwest Scottsdale, appeared to be invoking legislative immunity when he was pulled over, officials said.
“Do you know who I am?” Smith asked the arresting officer, according to a police report.
He was pulled over about 7:30 p.m. in the area of Pima and Lone Mountain roads and stumbled out of the car, police said.
Smith declined to comment Friday. Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin could not be immediately reached for comment.
Smith could not have legally claimed legislative immunity because the Legislature is not in session.
He was arrested on suspicion of DUI and was transported to Scottsdale Healthcare Shea Medical Center for a blood test, police said.
Police were tipped off to Smith at 6:57 p.m., when a motorist on Pima Road called police and reported that a late-model Chrysler 300 was swerving into oncoming traffic, according to officials.
Police said they found a car matching the description swerving in and out of its lane on a two-lane stretch of Pima Road near Lone Mountain Road.
When police attempted to pull the Chrysler over, it stopped abruptly in the middle of Pima Road, just north of Westland Road.
The car blocked 2 to 3 feet of the roadway, officers said.
After calling another officer to assist him, the arresting officer attempted to conduct sobriety tests on Smith, who refused, police said.
After officers placed him in handcuffs, Smith agreed to have his breath analyzed but refused standard field-sobriety tests, police said.
In using the machine, Smith initially inhaled several times, causing error readings before finally agreeing to exhale, officers said.
Smith ran for re-election to the House this year but lost in the Republican primary. He leaves office at the end of the year.
He is a personal-injury attorney at Smith Law Firm in Scottsdale.
Specializations listed on his company website include DUI and DWI arrest defenses.
Information regarding his court date was not immediately available.
Horne an embarrassment (hopefully) to himself
By EJ MONTINI
Sat, Nov 03 2012 6:29 PM
I told him the truth: I feel bad for Horne’s wife.
I don’t know her, but I’ve heard from someone who does that she is a very nice woman. I’d imagine these are difficult days for her and I don’t have the literary skills to make fun of her all-too-deserving husband without making things worse for her.
“Hey, a woman knows what she’s getting into when she marries a politician,” the caller said.
That’s true.
Spouses of politicians become accustomed to hearing and reading unpleasant things about their partners. Just as the children and extended families of other public figures get used to hearing criticism about a loved one’s job performance, whether their careers are in sports, entertainment or even the media. (Just ask my kids.)
Horne is no exception.
He's gotten bad press over allegations he was involved in an independent expenditure committee that attacked his Democratic opponent, Felicia Rotellini, during the 2010 race for AG.
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, a fellow Republican, concluded that Horne was close with Business Leaders for Arizona, a committee that raised and spent more than $500,000 to attack Rotellini with TV ads.
"There were contemporaneous e-mails and telephone conversations on how much money was expected from this particular source of funds, and what ... needed to be the message, concerns over the content of the commercial in production, and active communications about why maybe some of the messaging needed to be changed," Montgomery said.
And that’s not the only problem Horne has had.
He brought with him to the AG’s office a host of cronies from the state education department, where he was the elected superintendent.
He allegedly went after a whistle blower in the AGs when whistle blowers are among the most valuable people we have for routing out injustice.
He stood by and watched silently when the state legislature “swept” $50 million from the $97 million Arizona received as part of a nationwide lawsuit settlement, money that was meant to help struggling Arizona homeowners.
At the very least the state’s top cop should stand up for vulnerable citizens. He didn’t.
All of that is fair game.
This is different.
This time when Attorney General Horne made the news it had less to do with affairs of state than with the state of an affair. There was an incident tied to an alleged tryst with an employee that involved a minor hit-and-run that wasn’t reported.
According to the FBI report released by Phoenix police: “It should be noted that through the course of the investigation, SA (Special Agent) Grehoski and SA Mason learned that Horne is having an extramarital affair with Chenal and that they utilize Chenal’s apartment in furtherance of that affair. Though motive is not an element of the criminal statute listed above, it stands to reason that Horne did not want any record of his presence in the parking garage of Chenal’s apartment complex, thus he did not leave a note.”
A paragraph with as much sordid information as that is a gold mine for a sarcastic hack like me.
So why not exploit it? Shouldn’t Horne be embarrassed?
Yes.
But no one else should.
Unless, maybe, you voted for him.
N.Y. police informant: Paid for ‘baiting’ Muslims
From this article is sounds like the cops are tricking people into committing crimes so they can arrest them.
Top 20 airports where people are robbed by TSA agents.
I have seen news articles listing the top 20 car models stolen by crooks. But this is the first time I have ever seen an article that lists the top 20 airports where TSA crooks rob passengers.
Force him to show up to trial so it looks like he is getting a fair trial???
Source
Obama wants to murder suspected criminals
Hunt down criminals and arrest them??? Hell no, Obama plans to murder them. Screw that fair trial thing!
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne nailed for hit and run.
Isn't Tom Horne the jerk who asked Governor Jan Brewer to declare Prop 203 null and void so he could continue to send medical marijuana smokers to prison? I bet that was just a smoke screen to cover up his crimes!!!!
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne has received a misdemeanor citation alleging he caused paint damage to the bumper of a parked vehicle during a March 27 fender bender that he did not report.
Secret American Drone Warfare Base in Africa
Source
A CIA veteran transforms U.S. counterterrorism policy
Wow! America has turned into a police state as evil as any police state the world has ever seen. Sure we haven't murdered as many people as the Nazis, Soviets or Red Chinese, but give Obama and the next guy time and we very well could.
Sharpshooter in helicopter murders suspected drug smugglers
I have said a number of times I wonder when the US government will start using drones on American soil to murder suspected drug dealers with drone missile strikes.
More on dope sniffing dogs and the Supreme Court.
Source
Preckwinkle drops bullet tax, keeps gun tax
Source
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle today dropped plans for a five-cent bullet tax, but still wants to charge a $25 tax on every gun purchase.
Former North Chicago chief accused of stealing seized drug money
Now do you believe me when I say the "war on drugs" is a welfare program for cops????
Battle Amnesty International Must Win
AI fights the unconstitutional FISA law
Source
Death Penalty - A jobs program for lawyers??? Probably!!!
I like to call the death penalty a jobs program for lawyers, prosecutors and public defenders.
Adiós Arpaio
Scottsdale Rep David Burnell Smith busted for DUI
More of the old "do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters.
State Rep. David Burnell Smith was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in north Scottsdale on Oct. 21 after his car was seen swerving, police said.
Horne an embarrassment (hopefully) to himself
Source
“What is wrong with you?” asked the guy on the phone. “You used to go for the throat. I can’t BELIEVE you haven’t carved up (Attorney General) Tom Horne about that whole thing with the car and the woman and leaving the accident. Seriously, what’s up?”
While under surveillance by the FBI (There are legitimate question about why that was going on.) Horne and an employee named Carmen Chenal left the AG’s office at lunch time in separate cars. She borrowed a Volkswagen from a friend. He drove his Jaguar. They parked in a Phoenix garage near one another. Horne got out of his car, put on a baseball cap (a lame disguise) and then got into the VW. Horne was driving when agents said the VW hit a parked car and drove away without stopping to assess the damage, now estimated at over $1,000.
Arizona National Guard Corruption
I took the whole series of
articles
from the Arizona Republic on the corruption in the
Arizona National Guard an I put them in this
URL.
Previous articles on the American War Machine.
More articles on the American War Machine.