“In every presidency, a couple of Cabinet officials usually emerge as lightning rods for criticism [and A.G.] Eric Holder and DHS secretary Janet Napolitano find themselves playing that role on the volatile issues of terrorism and immigration,” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Steve Huntley leads. DHS “has been marred by mismanagement almost since the day it was established. Many parts of it have simply been a pork-barrel trough for states to eat up federal funds,” Jonas Stankovich asserts for The FrumForum. “Like its predecessor, the Obama White House has struggled with the politics of security funding and whipsawing demands from Congress,” The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu assesses.
Feds: Specialists with the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group established last year are questioning the Times Square bomb plotter, Reuters’ Adam Entous quotes the White House terror czar. In the leg-exec tussle over the Times Square case, A.G. Holder “has tightened his grip on our intelligence agencies,” Jed Babbin broods in RealClearPolitics. The notorious White House gate-crashers who sparked such a security flap last November are actually demanding an East Wing apology, The Dallas Morning News’ Colleen McCain Nelson is appalled to learn. “Pentagon boffins want nothing less than some kind of automated witch-finder technology able to finger ‘increasingly sophisticated malicious insider behavior’ in the USA,” The Register’s Lewis Page relates.
Homies: Against the arrival yesterday of Mexico’s prez, DHS and Justice officials say they are seizing more drugs, weapons and cash along the Mexican border, and expelling more illegal immigrants, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Perez reports. FEMA’s chief says an agency videographer was “absolutely wrong” to ask Mississippi church volunteers not to wear religious T-shirts for a video about tornado cleanup, The Associated Press’ Emily Wagster Pettus relates. President Obama’s pick of a third would-be TSA chief has revived calls to give the agency boss a 10-year term, the Post’s Ed O’Keefe blogs. Arizona’s new law targeting illegal immigration is not “good government,” The Chicago Tribune’s Oscar Avila quotes ICE chief John Morton.
State and local: A Homeland Security Alert asks Houston area law enforcers to watch for a potential terrorist affiliated with Somalia’s Al Shabaab group, KHOU 11 News notes. San Francisco’s sheriff wants to opt out of an ICE program that uses arrestees’ fingerprints to check their immigration status, the Chronicle relays. A missing hard drive containing personal info on more than 32,000 Arkansas Army National Guards has turned up, The Arkansas News Bureau relates — while The Bloomington Pantagraph sees Illinois Guards being cheered upon returning from a year in Iraq. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman says he’s “not getting involved” in a controversial proposal in his hometown aimed at curbing illegal immigration, The Omaha World-Herald relates.
Uncle Sugar: More than $92 million in disaster relief funds have been approved by FEMA “and Nashville residents appear to be receiving most of that money, a quick influx of cash that has pleased state officials and surprised recipients,” The Tennessean tells — while a Hearst Newspapers review “shows state and local officials across Connecticut have parlayed an unending stream of federal homeland security money into a bonanza of ‘free’ items.” Texas lawmakers who rapped Gov. Rick Perry’s allocation of DHS grants, in fact, tucked away a combined $5.5 million worth of earmarks in last year’s DHS appropriations bill for their districts, The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals.
Ivory (Watch) Towers: The College of DuPage’s $25 million Homeland Security Education Center will include a “tactical village,” a command center, advanced forensics and cybercrime labs, even a lecture hall doubling as a mock courtroom, The Chicago Tribune elaborates. It takes more than a few classes: Employers looking for cybersecurity experts are not interested in newbies with just a certificate and no experience, of which commodity there is a glut, DarkReading relates. DHS is providing crowd management training yesterday and today to local responders at Solano Community College in Vacaville, Calif., The Auburn Journal alerts. Virginia Tech broke federal campus security laws by waiting too long to notify students during a 2007 shooting rampage, the Post has an Education Department report due tomorrow finding.
Bugs ‘n bombs: “In all, 30,000 airmen have been shifted to the front lines of cyberwarfare,” Air Force Times leads — while Fire Engineering provides a downloadable awareness card to prompt responders confronted by “vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.” The Strategic National Stockpile is receiving shipments of a modified smallpox vaccine for those with compromised immune systems, Global Security Newswire notes. The worldwide eradication of smallpox may, inadvertently, have helped spread HIV infection, BBC News has scientists suggesting. “We have the problem of nuclear security and nuclear terrorism,” and people need to understand that “if an incident takes place, they will be exposed to radiation,” Bloomberg quotes the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Coming and going: Federal and state authorities are conducting a series of anti-terrorism training exercises this week at ports throughout California, The Oakland Tribune relays — while AP sees a Navy-trained sea lion taking “less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near AT&T Park.” Confronted with the dilemmas posed by prosecuting Somali pirates, many ship captains “release” captured buccaneers in rubber rafts far out to sea where they are never seen again, Slate relates. An “ironic side effect” of Arizona’s new immigration law may be more undocumented residents applying for temporary work visas and permanent citizenship, Arizona Capitol Times research shows. While DHS conducts a program review of its troubled border fence program, CBP has not stopped deploying new sensors in the Southwest, National Defense Magazine mentions.
Close air support: A Newark airport TSA screener has been charged in federal court with pocketing $495 while inspecting a wheelchair-bound woman’s purse, the Star-Ledger relates — which incident a Post blogger adds to “a growing list of troubling cases involving agency workers.” A U.S.-bound Delta flight was turned back to Japan on Monday, it turns out, because two passengers locked themselves inside a bathroom with a “container of suspicious liquid,” Agence France-Presse reports. Seeking to trump a controversial state law and matching a Senate initiative, a Georgia congressman is floating a bill criminalizing carrying a gun in any airport, Atlanta’s WSBTV 2 News notes. “It seems strange to me that the no-fly list is not checked at the initial security checkpoint instead of at the individual airline’s boarding section,” a U.S. News reader writes.
Courts and rights: The appointment of a well-respected ex-Navy lawyer to oversee war-crime trials is being seen as a sign Justice might reverse its decision to try 9/11 conspirators in NYC, The Washington Times leads. A Missouri auto dealer pleaded guilty in a Kansas City federal courtroom yesterday to giving $23,500 to al Qaeda, the Star relates. Sen. Lindsey Graham says he and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan “found common agreement” on legal issues in U.S. anti-terror policies, McClatchy Newspapers reports. It appears one of two men arrested in Boston-area Times Square-related terror raids may have been married to two women, WHDH 7 News notes.
Over there: Convicted terrorist Momin Khawaja could have been acquitted if motive hadn’t been excluded from his trial, The Canadian Press has his lawyer telling the Ontario Court of Appeal. French police have arrested 14 men suspected of plotting a prison escape to free an Islamist militant involved in the bloody 1995 Paris Metro bombings, Reuters reports. Two Pakistani students arrested in anti-terror raids have won their fight to remain in the U.K. after arguing that they would be at risk if deported, The Guardian recounts — even as the court acknowledged that one of them led an al Qaeda plot to bomb British targets, BBC News adds.
Over here: “American Muslims noticed when . . . the Naval Criminal Investigative Service stopped using an anti-Muslim film ‘Obsession: Radical Islam’s Obsession with the West’ to train agents,” retired Secret Service man Walied Shater comments in the Post. Times Square scourge Faisal Shahzad’s “argument with American foreign policy grew after 9/11, even as he enjoyed America’s financial promise and expansive culture,” an in-depth New York Times profile relates — as a Boston Herald columnist interviews local Muslim entrepreneurs “baffled and enraged” by the alleged actions of two Bay State Pakistanis arrested in the Shahzad case. “Dreams by a Muslim group to build a mosque near Ground Zero may not match its means,” The New York Post leads.
Holy Wars: “If we want Times Square to be safer from terrorists, we need to start by helping make Pakistan safer as well,” a Times columnist comments. While a growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts, a cleric in Munich openly declares that al Qaeda and its ilk are violating the tenets of Islam, the Times also profiles. There is little info about the role social network websites might play in the recruitment of terrorists, but the FBI is seeing an increase in the use of such pages by radical groups, CBS News spotlights. What appears to be a young European or North American male was spotted in a Taliban video Sunday, The Washington Post reports.
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