Behind the Lines for Thursday, May 20, 2010 — 3 P.M.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Mitigate that gall, please: Seeking perhaps to extend their 15 minutes, notorious White House gatecrashers demanding East Wing apology . . . Witchfinder general: Pentagon seeking "automated witch-finder technology" to finger "malicious insider behavior" . . . Bad screener, no donut: Newark airport TSA agent charged with pocketing $495 from wheelchair-bound passenger's purse. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
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“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.
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.
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.
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 Timesresearch 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.
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.
Soldiers collecting identification cards of protestors who were cleared from their camps in downtown Bangkok on Thursday. (AP Photo)
Normalcy on the Horizon in Smoldering Bangkok
Bangkok. The Thai government declared on Thursday it had mostly quelled 10 weeks of violent protests in the capital as buildings still smoldered, troops rooted out small pockets of resistance and residents attempted to return to normal life.
But a curfew was extended in Bangkok and 23 other provinces for three more days. Troops and die-hard antigovernment protesters exchanged sporadic fire in parts of the city after the military operation the day before cleared most of a protest encampment in the center of the capital, leaving 15 dead and 96 wounded.
A special police unit on Thursday led more than 1,000 people — many of them women and children — away from a Buddhist temple in the heart of the former Red Shirt protest zone. Six bodies were found on its grounds.
The police had the approval of the temple’s abbot, but many of the women feared they would be jailed or abused by police and cried or clung to each other as they were led out. Others remained defiant.
“We won. We won. The Red Shirts will rise again,” one woman shouted.
Three more Red Shirt leaders surrendered to authorities on Thursday. Five leaders gave themselves up the day before and were flown to a military camp south of Bangkok for interrogation.
“I’d like to ask all sides to calm down and talk with each other in a peaceful manner,” said Veera Musikapong after being taken into custody Thursday. “We cannot create democracy with anger.”
Army spokesman Col. Sansern Kawekamnerd said the situation in the capital was mostly under control.
But a branch of Siam City Bank was set afire, the first reported arson attack after 39 buildings were torched the day before. According to state-run television, a firefighter was shot and wounded on Thursday while trying to put out the flames at a shopping center.
The situation was also volatile outside Bangkok.
Nation Television reported one person was killed and 14 wounded in the northeastern province of Khon Kaen, one of several provinces where protests erupted Wednesday.
Among the torched buildings in Bangkok were Thailand’s stock exchange, main power company, banks, a movie theater and one of Asia’s largest shopping malls.
Troops in the central business district exchanged fire on Thursday morning with holdouts as locals looted a vast tent city the activists had cobbled together.
Since the Red Shirts began their protest in mid March, at least 83 people — mostly civilians — have been killed and nearly 1,800 wounded. Of those, 51 people died in clashes that started on May 13 after the army tried to blockade their three-square-kilometer camp.
City workers on Thursday removed debris and collected piles of garbage left in the streets. With military checkpoints coming down, residents in protest areas were able to leave home to shop.
Sansern said the arson and looting were “systematically planned” by Red Shirt leaders before they surrendered.
He said the military showed restraint.
“If we had the intention to attack civilians, the death toll would have been much higher,” he said.
It was unclear what the next move would be for the protesters who had demanded the ouster of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s government and new elections. The protesters, many of them poor farmers or members of the urban underclass, say Abhisit came to power illegitimately and is oblivious to their plight.
The crackdown should silence the large number of government supporters who were urging a harder line, and the rioting that followed may extinguish some of the widespread sympathy for the protesters’ cause.
But that same violence also showed a serious intelligence lapse by the military, and the failure to secure areas of the capital raised doubt over the government’s ability to still unrest in the protesters’ heartland of the north and northeast.
Indonesia and Timor-Leste have done much to normalise relations ten years after the end to Indonesian rule in the former province, but the goodwill between capitals is not yet matched by full cooperation on the border. The costs are greatest in Oecusse, Timor-Leste’s isolated enclave inside Indonesian West Timor. Negotiators have so far failed to agree on two segments of Oecusse’s border, leaving open the risk that minor local disputes could be politicised and escalate into larger conflicts. Without a final demarcation, steps to improve management of the porous border have stalled. Initiatives that would promote exchanges and lessen the enclave’s isolation remain unimplemented. As the bonds between the two nations grow, they should prioritise this unfinished business. Leaving it unresolved can only promote crime, corruption and the possibility of conflict.
The security threat to Oecusse and its 67,000 inhabitants has sharply decreased since independence. While the unresolved border segments remain a catalyst for occasional tensions, no violence has taken place in recent years. Settlement of the border issue requires both national and local responses. The governments must work with renewed urgency to resolve the remaining disputed segments. Whatever border is agreed will not satisfy everyone. To alleviate this discontent, local arrangements for cross-border activities should be promoted. Without such flexibility, long-standing local disputes will fester and could escalate into active conflict.
Beyond security threats, the two countries face a range of border management challenges over the movement of people and goods. Though the enclave has remained politically distinct for several hundred years, links remain strong between families divided by the border. They cross regularly for marriages and funerals. Some even farm land in the other country. Isolated from the rest of Timor-Leste, residents depend on cheap goods from Indonesia.
Informal arrangements have served to facilitate movement of goods and people in the absence of a sustainable system that would promote rather than criminalise local traffic, but these are often put on hold when border tensions rise, increasing Oecusse’s vulnerability. Both countries are establishing civilian border management agencies that may help accommodate local interests in the medium term, but they are still months, if not years away. Unresolved issues regarding accountability for the violence around the 1999 referendum and the subsequent large-scale displacement across the border pose challenges that are more political than security-oriented. Their resolution is a prerequisite for the enclave’s long-term stability.
While Oecusse’s viability in the years following independence was once questioned – chiefly by foreign observers – such concerns underestimated the strong sense of Timorese identity in the enclave and overestimated the threat from former Indonesia-era militia on the other side of the border. Investment by the central government has increased, sending a message of Dili’s commitment to the enclave. While welcomed by residents, such efforts start from a low base. Infrastructure remains poor, access to information limited and the ability to deliver government services low. Nationwide decentralisation was to have given this district the autonomy to determine some of its own cross-border affairs, but the process has stalled at national level. Timor-Leste’s leadership should consider uncoupling Oecusse’s regional development from the broader process and look for ways to provide means and funds to promote direct cross-border cooperation.
As Indonesia and Timor-Leste work on being good neighbours, they should focus on concrete actions that improve life for the people and lessen the risk of conflict on both sides of the border. While Indonesian doctrine means a significant decrease in security forces on the border is unlikely in the near term, demilitarisation of the frontier should remain on the agenda as a long-term goal that would truly reflect normal relations. Immediate steps that should be taken include:
finalising demarcation of the border as a matter of priority;
formalising arrangements for efficient communications between government and security forces on both sides of the border and at all levels, so as to create avenues for quick de-escalation of future incidents;
introducing the long-discussed border pass system for citizens of both countries and implementing the initiative for joint border markets that would facilitate both commercial and social exchange; and
improving the training, equipment, and facilities of Timor-Leste’s border patrol unit.
JohnAMacDougall #Bangkok Grows Calm, but Social Divisions Remain - NYTimes.com http://nyti.ms/9QQWXY #thailand
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