“Drug traffickers fighting to control northern Mexico have turned their guns and grenades on the Mexican army, in an apparent escalation of warfare that played out across multiple cities,” The Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson updates — and see The Washington Post’s William Booth on the rise of a prison-spawned, cross-border paramilitary killing machine. “Maybe she’s just taking orders from her boss, Barack Obama. Or maybe she’s forgotten who she is — or was,” Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts hazards as to why DHS’s Janet Napolitano hasn’t yet dispatched troops to the border. “How to account for this refusal to appreciate a primary security problem escalating along our 1,500-mile southern border?” Sol Sanders muses in The Washington Times.
Feds: Since the Southwest Border Security Initiative began a year ago, DHS has increased tactical support to border area law enforcers, The Brownsville (Texas) Herald’s Laura Tillman relatedly surveys. The Pakistani Taliban takes credit for yesterday’s multipronged suicide attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, in which two non-U.S. defenders were killed, Al Jazeera reports — as the Post’s Joshua Partlow finds U.S. officials troubled by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s threat to join the Taliban before bowing to foreign interference. A year on, the FBI’s eGuardian system “has proven a robust tool for aggregating terrorist threat information,” reaping 3,400 suspicious activity reports generating 56 investigations, a bureau official tells Security Management’s Joseph Straw.
Thin ICE: A federal program that partners local police agencies with ICE has grown rapidly without ensuring that police follow federal priorities or respect civil rights, The Arizona Republic’s Daniel Gonzalez has a DHS IG report finding. “The irony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s acronym has never been lost on anyone, including the agency itself,” Mary Giovagnoli spotlights on AlterNet. “Setting quotas to deport more illegal immigrants would mean diverting resources from getting rid of some of the nation’s worst criminals,” a Post reader writes. From 1997 to 2007, ICE and its predecessor deported the lawful immigrant parents of nearly 88,000 citizen children, Homeland Security Newswire learns from a report — and see Tanya Golash-Boza in CounterPunch: “ICE on the Border: The Politics of Deportation.”
State and Local: At an April 17 event in Albany, military and federal experts will brief responders and the public on coping with natural disasters and terrorist attacks, the Times Union tells — while The Pueblo Chieftain has Gov. Bill Ritter naming four area law enforcers to the homeland-security-bolstering Colorado Interoperability Executive Council, and The Sioux Falls Argus Leader sees a Highway Patrol vet appointed director of South Dakota’s Office of Homeland Security. New CDC numbers show tiny Rhode Island boasting the highest rate of swine flu vaccinations, about 39 percent, three times higher than Mississippi, which has the weakest participation, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger relays — as The Austin American-Statesman sees Texas officials monitoring a rise in swine flu cases in the Southeast United States and encouraging inoculation.
Bid-ness: The reason DHS and other agencies struggle to hire expert cyberwarriors “is simple: The pool of truly skilled security professionals is a small one, and the government is only the latest suitor vying for their talents,” The San Francisco Chronicle spotlights. “Despite growing awareness of how devastating a cyber-attack could be, many businesses still haven’t implemented security measures,” The New New Internet has a recent report highlighting. A former Chicago Police superintendent and a retired Secret Service chief helm a fast-growing security consulting firm, the Sun-Times profiles. The deadliest terrorist attacks on Moscow since 2004 didn’t stop Russian stocks from climbing more than every market worldwide last week, Bloomberg relates.
Bugs ‘n Bombs: A “certified cleaning expert” briefs The Lansdale (Pa.) Reporter on sanitizing measures for situations ranging up to “weapons-grade pathogens and bioterrorism.” Speaking of the Keystone State, the Biosecurity and Vaccine Development Improvement Act would keep money moving to one of recently deceased Rep. Jack Murtha’s pet recipients of taxpayer dollars, BioPrepWatch relates. Years after a six-month deadline passed, dozens of nations, including uranium producers, ignore a U.N. mandate on controls to foil nuclear terrorism, The Associated Press reports — while the Post reports that in the nuclear posture statement due today, Obama appears to be backing off promises to take the nation’s nuclear weapons off “hair-trigger alert.”
Close Air Support: Four newspaper companies are progressing with a suit to force Raleigh-Durham International to allow post-security newspaper racks, which airport authorities describe as a terror risk, USA Today updates. The newly announced screening regime for incoming non-citizens “will treat all passengers flying into the United States in the same way, regardless of their faith or nationality,” Arab News applauds — while a North Star National op-ed claims the measures “will weaken our ability to screen out terrorists.” The suspected terrorist who drove a car onto a Nigerian airport’s tarmac and into a parked aircraft “may have targeted the five Americans and top politicians on board the aircraft,” The Sunday Punch reports — as The Toronto Star terms a cadre of Mounties serving as in-flight security officers “one of Canada’s secret weapons in the war on terror.”
Coming and Going: “The key to unbinding the Gordian knot of mass transit rail security is to accept risk,” an Antiwar.com op-ed asserts. “Like much of TSA’s efforts on aviation security, its mass transit and passenger rail efforts remain a work in progress,” Homeland Security Watch adds. “Perhaps the most overlooked mode of transportation is our nation’s system of pipelines. With few resources, the TSA must protect this mode, in addition to more obvious ones like aviation and rail,” The Boston Herald leads. “There’s also the possibility of Seaport Canaveral being an enticing target for terrorists,” Florida Today observes, referencing the port’s new 118 million gallon tank farm. “A security expert warns the technology is far from perfect as Canada prepares to join 60 other countries next year and begin issuing electronic passports,” Calgary’s 660 News notes.
Home Front: Senate homelander Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., warned Sunday that extreme partisan anger is increasing the risk of domestic terrorism in the United States, Voice of America’s Paula Wolfson relates. If the Hutaree militia “are scapegoats of the Obama Homeland Security machine, well, we may never know it. One thing I do know for certain is these people are the perfect target for Napolitano and her gang,” Gina Miller conspiracizes for Dakota Voice. The Michigan militia arrests “should serve as a wake-up call to those in political leadership roles who are inciting rage against the government,” James Zogby exhorts in The Huffington Post. “Violence with the stated goal of changing the internal workings of our democracy is terrorism, not patriotism,” The Marion (Ohio) Star adjures. “Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new report of political violence . . . there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled ‘terrorism’?” The New York Times’ Scott Shane explores.
Talking Terror: Some leaders “call for an offshore strategy of counterterrorism to retaliate after an attack rather than an in-country strategy of counterinsurgency to prevent such attacks,” Henry R. Nau notes in Policy Review. “Terrorism is like jazz; it’s all about improvisation and variation. That’s why conventional forces are dead in the water against it; they’re all ‘by the book,’ with top-down command and control,” Doug Casey tells HoweStreet.com. “We are safer because, despite his rhetoric, Obama became Bush in matters of anti-terrorism,” Victor Davis Hanson asserts in The National Review. Female suicide bombers are more driven by abusive histories than nationalist yearnings, Haaretz has a new book published in Israel positing — and check IPT News on “The Growing Threat from Female Suicide Bombers.”
Courts and rights: A pregnant American charged in a global terror plot will plead not guilty at a hearing tomorrow in Pennsylvania, AP learns — as The Chicago Sun-Times relays word of a Chicago cabbie also pleading innocent yesterday to attempting to aid al Qaeda. Unlawful immigration status is insufficient cause to permit lawsuit plaintiffs to hide behind anonymity, The Arkansas News Bureau has that state’s Supreme Court ruling — while The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covers the conclusion of a case that at one time promised to involve international terror finance. “It’s not that we aren’t going to have the rule of law. It’s which rule of law,” The Huffington Post quotes Lieberman, again, promoting military trials for accused terrorists.
Over There: A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes in the Af-Pak border region this year has cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Times leads. The leader of an Islamist terror group widely considered to be a nationalist insurgent organization has invited Osama bin Laden to Somalia, The Long War Journal relates. Salafi-Jihadi activities in Mauritania have increased significantly in the last couple of years, indicating that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups are becoming more effective in that country, Terrorism Monitor mentions.
Do You Solemnly Swear: “Things are slowly returning to normal today at the White House in the wake of the recent F-Bomb scare,” Unconfirmed Sources confirms. “All offices of the White House are back in operation after a tense afternoon following the evacuation of the entire facility during the signing ceremony for the bill to reform the American health care system. The evacuation was ordered when a Secret Service agent who was monitoring the bill signing determined that an F-Bomb had been dropped near the president. He was spirited away to a secure facility and the White House staff was also evacuated. The White House F-Bomb squad was called in and secured the building. The team of F-Bomb experts searched the building and recovered the remains of the F-Bomb, nobody was injured during the operation . . . Lawmakers, fresh from their success in passing Health Care Reform, have already vowed to address the F-Bomb crisis.”
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