Starting Points

Apr 5, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Monday, April 5, 2010

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Citizen action: Anti-government group's threatening letters to 30-plus governors "could provoke violence," FBI warns local police . . . Secretary as scapegoat: DHS's Napolitano "may have the worst job in Washington -- where even minor missteps can prove professionally calamitous," New Republic remarks . . . Waiting to inhale: BioWatch sensors detect the bacterium that causes tularemia in Columbus, Ohio, air supply. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group’s call to remove governors from office could provoke violence, The Associated Press’ Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett relate. At least 30 state executives have received the Guardians of the Free Republics’ demand that they cede office within three days, the Los Angeles Times’ Kathleen Hennessey adds. The man at the center of the affair seems to be Texas talk show host Sam Kennedy, The Christian Science Monitor’s Patrik Jonsson reports — though Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein traces the Guardians’ Web address to “one Clive Boustred of Soquel, California — a British-educated former South African soldier with an apparent knack for ‘anti-terrorist warfare.’”

Barack O’Bush: Current and former counterterrorists see little difference between President Obama’s policy on remote-control drone attacks and that of his predecessor, save for his greater openness, Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball surveys. While welcoming an Obama administration effort to legally justify drone strikes on suspected terrorists, “human rights groups say critical questions remain unanswered,” Jim Lobe, relatedly, writes for Inter-Press Service. Last week’s court ruling on warrantless wiretapping may force on the table discussion of how aggressively the administration should continue to defend Bush-era counterterror policy from judicial review, The New York Times’ James Risen and Charlie Savage assess.

Homies: The leaderless TSA and embattled Federal Air Marshals suffered a personnel shake-up Thursday, CBS News’ Pia Malbran relates, posting “internal emails explaining the new management changes.” For all of DHS boss Janet Napolitano’s “vaunted assets, she may have the worst job in Washington — one where keeping the public safe is only part of the battle and where even minor missteps can prove professionally calamitous,” Michelle Cottle mulls in a New Republic profile. Aviation experts and officials say that the administration’s new screening protocols for air passengers coming to the United States are a marked improvement over the regime imposed immediately after the Dec. 25 bombing attempt, the Times’ Scott Shane notes — as The Village Voice’s Jen Doll terms the new rules “vague as all get out,” and The Hill’s Susan Crabtree airs Rep. Pete King’s fury at White House homeland adviser John Brennan for not briefing Congress about the changes.

State and Local: DHS’s Napolitano last week announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the murder of an Arizona border rancher, The Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News notes — as The Providence Journal sees her in flood-ravaged Rhode Island on Friday reserving judgment whether “local match” rules will be waived on FEMA disaster aid. The Pentagon is investigating the second sighting within three weeks of a Mexican military chopper flying in U.S. airspace over rural Zapata County, The San Antonio Express-News notes — while CBS News has two more explosive devices turning up in a post office collection box and a mailbox in East Texas last week. For much of Thursday morning, those who needed an ambulance or a police officer in Nebraska’s capital city got only a busy signal when they called for help, The Omaha World-Herald relates.

Bugs ‘n Bombs: Columbus, Ohio, health officials announced last week that the bacterium that causes tularemia was found during routine air sampling, NBC4i News notes — while The Columbus Dispatch spotlights the BioWatch program that detected the potential bioterror agent. The ACLU of Michigan has filed a brief trying to get the court to drop bioterror charges against an HIV-positive man accused of biting his neighbor, The Detroit Free Press reports — and see a new CRS Report: “Federal Efforts to Address the Threat of Bioterrorism: Selected Issues for Congress.” Last week’s cancellation of a terror nuke response simulation in Las Vegas and reconsideration of next year’s National Level Exercise play into a quiet debate about the future of the large-scale national exercises, The Washington Post reports.

Know Nukes: The United States faces a critical shortage of atomic arms mavens, needed to manage an aging arsenal and monitor world stockpiles, The Boston Globe spotlights. “If we want to stop Burma’s atomic ambitions, we should engage the regime and encourage political liberalization,” The National Interest advises. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed Saturday that new nuclear sanctions would only strengthen the country’s technological progress by encouraging it to become more self-sufficient, the Post reports — as the L.A. Times learns that Iranian scientists plan to launch at least one new nuclear facility by September, and check The Weekly Standard on “The CIA’s Curious Report on Iran’s Nuclear Program.” Jonathan Schell, meantime, ponders in The Nation, “How can nuclear weapons be abolished when nuclear technology has gone global?” — and The Times of London previews this week’s nuclear posture review release.

Close Air Support: “Finally, in the changed travel environment following the foiling of the Christmas Day bomber, United States security officials are taking a holistic approach,” The San Gabriel Valley (Calif.) Tribune applauds. Cleveland Browns nose tackle Shaun Rogers pleaded innocent Saturday to trying to board with a loaded handgun at Hopkins International Airport, The Plain Dealer records. “With the summer flying season throttling up, the feds are cracking down locally and nationally on passengers looking to cash in on spurious luggage-theft claims,” The Boston Herald leads. Every year, more than 50,000 personal items — including a wedding dress, a prosthetic leg and $10,000 in cash — are abandoned at Orlando airport screening areas and turned in to lost and found, the Sentinel says.

Coming and Going: A new report paints a gloomy picture of the nation’s ground transportation system, reaching the “unnerving conclusion that security . . . is ‘inefficient’ and ‘poorly coordinated,’” ABC News notes. Oregon’s largest transit agency says it will use a $1.9 million DHS grant to install closed-circuit cameras at nine more light-rail stations, The Bend Bulletin relates. An anti-terrorism exercise next month will test Melbourne’s underground rail network’s responses to a full-scale attack, The Herald Sun says. The U.S. Maritime Administration has warned cruise lines that pirate attacks are likely to increase in the waters off the Horn of Africa and in the Indian Ocean over the next two months, USA Today tells.

Courts and Rights: A Colorado woman was indicted Friday for her role in a terrorist plot to kill a Swedish artist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, “while toting her 6-year-old son around with her to European terrorist camps,” The Denver Post reports. A federal court last week ordered Iran to pay $1.3 billion to the victims of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the latest in a series of enormous verdicts against rogue nations, ABC News notes —while Stars and Stripes has another fed bench ruling that Camp Lejeune can’t ban anti-Islamic decals while allowing bumper stickers that say “Islam Is Love” or “Islam Is Peace.” Assailing “predatory exploitation of U.S. courts by Islamists,” Daniel Pipes wonders in The American Spectator, “How can this abuse of the U.S. legal system be prevented?” See also The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on the death of an Afghan detainee in U.S. custody.

From Russia With Loathe: Other countries’ leaders would pay a political price for not preventing a startling attack like the Moscow metro suicide attacks on March 29, but not in Russia, where terrorism has long served to strengthen Vladimir Putin’s hand, The New York Times assesses. The subway blasts could have been planned and executed by people trained in Pakistan’s tribal areas, jihadi circles there believe, Asia Times tells — as Reuters reports that one of the two bombers was the 17-year-old widow of a North Caucasus insurgent, and AP says the “Black Widows” may have been motivated by a forest massacre in which garlic-picking villagers were slain by Russian government forces. Two bombs that derailed a freight train in Russia’s Dagestan province Sunday are linked to the Moscow blasts, RIA Novosti notes.

Qaeda Qorner: In recent years, “a crop of American citizens have sympathized with, or, in some cases wholeheartedly embraced, the Taliban and al Qaeda,” Newsweek notes, offering a rogues gallery of “the newest breed of traitor.” A noted Pakistani journalist, who has twice interviewed Osama bin Laden, insists there is no evidence to prove he is dead, and moreover al Qaeda would never hide its chieftain’s death, ANI notes — while The Daily Telegraph has Pakistani forces “launching an offensive in North Waziristan, believed to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden,” and check Foreign Policy, relatedly, on “al Qaeda’s ground zero.” U.S. and Iraqi troops have killed or arrested at least six suspected al Qaeda leaders allegedly involved in an extortion and assassination ring in northern Iraq, Reuters reports. At least 20 civilians were killed and dozens injured in clashes between al Qaeda-linked Islamic militants and government forces in the Somali capital, CNN has hospital officials saying Saturday.

Parlez Vous Barbeque: “Officials from the United States and Canada gathered today in Canada’s capital city to sign an historic agreement whereby the countries agree to exchange the province of Quebec for the state of Texas,” CAP News notes. “‘It’s basically an even-steven swap,’ said U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson. ‘Texas already seceded from the United States once, back in the 1800’s, and they’ve been talking about doing it again for a while. Likewise, Quebeckers have been clamoring for a break from Canada for years. For both governments, this was an easy play,’ added Jacobson. ‘Our feeling is, if you don’t like being part of this country, maybe you’ll like being part of theirs better, and vice versa.’ The move is expected to be a boon for the trucking industry, whose vehicles begin rolling almost immediately to start swapping the two locations piece by piece. Officials said that while some things may break or be lost in transit, they expect both Texas and Quebec to be delivered mostly intact.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Apr 4, 2010

Advertising on a Wall, Not a Web Site - NYTimes.com

Image by j klo via Flickr

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

MANY people hustle right past the wall pasted with paper fliers on Forsyth Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. But others make pilgrimages to this easternmost reach of Chinatown, where scores of advertisements, most handwritten in Chinese, are posted, their phone-number strips curling like beckoning fingers.

The wall functions as an offline Craigslist — a Craigswall, if you will — where Mandarin and Cantonese speakers do brisk business renting rooms to longtime residents and newly arrived immigrants for whom English and the Internet are as yet unnavigable. There is a similar wall inside a grocery store in Flushing, Queens.

Though the wall on Forsyth Street advertises mostly apartments, Margaret Chin, who represents Chinatown on the City Council, said she had seen all kinds of fliers around the neighborhood, including complaints about particular lawyers.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

“If you have something to say,” she said, “you write it up and you just post it up.” The custom of hawking goods and ideas by poster and placard took hold in China after the 1949 revolution, said Lincoln Cushing, co-author of “Chinese Revolutionary Posters: Art From the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

In rural towns, “You would have this wall that would be taken over” by placards, he said. “People stand in front of this wall and read this, and they respond by putting up their own character poster.” Flier-covered Chinatown, he said, is quite likely “an echo of that.”

The wall in Flushing, inside the A & N Food Market at 4179 Main Street, has been up for about 20 years. It’s “a landmark, like the Empire State Building,” said Tem Shieh, 60, the market’s manager. Unlike the wall on Forsyth Street, it is highly organized: advertisers must use a certain form and pay $1.50 for three days. Occasionally, landlords have spats over covering up one another’s ads, Mr. Shieh said; some even stand guard for hours by the roughly 12-by-14-foot wall, making sure their ad remains visible.

Image by ohad* via Flickr

A & N Food Market sells 100 forms a day and, as on Forsyth Street, many of the ads are for a room or rooms within people’s homes. As with the Chinatown wall, rents are rarely listed — they are negotiated — but people say they are generally low.

Image by Pinachina via Flickr

In Chinatown, Nancy Lin, who works at the Internet cafe on the second floor of the building with the ads, said the caretakers there tear them down once or twice a week. But “they’re back up” within minutes, she said. “Not in an hour, in a half-hour, maybe 20 minutes.”

Juanjuan Li, 46, who recently moved to New York from China, was apartment hunting at the wall one cold weekday afternoon, on the recommendation of someone in her English class. The scene was far from her American dream. “This is not New York like in the ‘Gossip Girls,’ ” she said.

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

Protesters Block Heart of Bangkok’s Shopping Zone - NYTimes.com

Image by Honou via Flickr

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — Antigovernment protesters who have camped out on the streets of Bangkok for the past three weeks raised the stakes in their mass demonstrations on Saturday, converging on the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district and vowing to remain until new elections are called.

Tens of thousands of protesters, including many families with small children, took over a main intersection, blocking roads leading to upscale shopping malls and five-star hotels and demanding that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand take action soon.

“We will remain here until the government declares that Parliament is dissolved,” said Veera Musikapong, one of the leaders of the protesters, who are known as the Red Shirts.

The government, which until Saturday had tried to take a conciliatory tone, ordered the demonstrators out of the area.

The Thai Foreign Ministry said the government would follow a “multistep approach, from light to heavier measures,” in what appeared to be a turning point in its handling of the crisis, the latest chapter of four years of political turmoil.

On Tuesday the Thai cabinet extended the use of a law that allows the military to clear out protesters and make arrests. Mr. Abhisit said Saturday that protesters had exceeded the limits of their constitutional right to demonstrate and that the government would negotiate or use legal means to oust them.

Mr. Abhisit has offered to call new elections within nine months — about a year before his term ends — but protest leaders, who claim the government is illegitimate, rejected the concession. The Red Shirts, who have wide support in the populous north and northeast, would probably win elections if they were held now, analysts believe.

Protesters, many of whom support Thaksin Shinawatra, who was removed as prime minister in a 2006 military coup, say they are angry at what they perceive as the undue influence of the country’s bureaucracy, military and elite.

Mr. Thaksin, who is overseas and wanted by the Thai authorities for a corruption conviction, addressed the crowd by video link on Saturday. He urged the crowd to fight for equality.

The Red Shirt demonstrations had until Saturday mostly affected a neighborhood of government ministries and offices. By blockading the main commercial district, however, protest leaders have considerably ratcheted up the pressure on Mr. Abhisit’s government.

Despite the threats to remove them, protesters appeared to be in a jovial mood late Saturday. As they listened to speeches, many camped out on the sidewalk in front of display windows advertising luxury brands like Dior, Ferragamo and Tag Heuer.

Tourists who pushed through the throngs of red-shirted protesters said they were polite and helpful.

“I don’t feel threatened,” said Elizabeth York, a visitor from London whose 1-year-old was in a stroller. “They make way for the babies,” she said.

Others were less forgiving of the demonstrators. An 18-year-old Thai, the scion of a wealthy family, drove his Porsche into protesters’ motorcycles and was besieged by the crowd before the riot police intervened, The Associated Press reported.

A woman who said she had to walk several miles to work because of the demonstration gave this assessment of the protesters: “They are very poor and very stupid.”

Violence Helps Taliban Undo Afghan Gains - NYTimes.com

Image by Helmandblog via Flickr

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

MARJA, Afghanistan — Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support.

The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marja, where the Taliban seem to know everything — and most of the time it is impossible to even tell who they are — they have already found ways to thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some who take the Marines’ money, or pocketing it themselves.

Just a few weeks since the start of the operation here, the Taliban have “reseized control and the momentum in a lot of ways” in northern Marja, Maj. James Coffman, civil affairs leader for the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, said in an interview in late March. “We have to change tactics to get the locals back on our side.”

Col. Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan National Police commander here, says his informants have told him that at least 30 Taliban have come to one Marine outpost here to take money from the Marines as compensation for property damage or family members killed during the operation in February.

“You shake hands with them, but you don’t know they are Taliban,” Colonel Sakhi said. “They have the same clothes, and the same style. And they are using the money against the Marines. They are buying I.E.D.’s and buying ammunition, everything.”

One tribal elder from northern Marja, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being killed, said in an interview on Saturday that the killing and intimidation continued to worsen. “Every day we are hearing that they kill people, and we are finding their dead bodies,” he said. “The Taliban are everywhere.”

Image by Helmandblog via Flickr

The local problem points to the larger challenges ahead as American forces expand operations in the predominantly Pashtun south, where the Taliban draw most of their support and the government is deeply unpopular.

In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin to the only political organization in a one-party town, with an influence that touches everyone. Even the Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.

“We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”

“We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We have to deal with these people.”

The Marines hoped the work programs would be a quick way to put to work hundreds of “military-aged males,” as they call them. In some places, that has worked. But the programs have run into jeopardy in other parts of Marja, an area of about 80 square miles that is a patchwork of lush farmland and small bazaars and villages.

In northern Marja, the biggest blow came when the local man hired to supervise the work programs was beaten by the Taliban and refused to help the Marines any more. The programs are “completely dead in the water” there, Major Coffman said.

In addition to work programs, the Marines are using compensation payments to build support for the newly appointed district governor of Marja, Hajji Abdul Zahir, telling people that to receive money they must get his approval. That effort has proved equally vulnerable.

In late March, an Afghan man was beaten by the Taliban hours after he had gone to the Marine outpost that houses Mr. Zahir’s office to collect his compensation. The Taliban took the money and stole a similar amount as punishment, said Colonel Sakhi, the police commander.

“My greatest fear right now is not knowing if I have put money into the pockets of the Taliban,” Major Coffman said.

Despite those reservations, the Marine strategy depends on sowing this community with buckets of cash. The money is a bridge to a day when, in theory, the new Marja district government will have more credibility than the Taliban.

That would be a difficult goal even if the Americans did not intend to rid the region of its lucrative poppy crop. While the United States has abandoned the policy of widespread eradication of the crop, efforts to discourage planting it will still cost farmers and power brokers huge sums.

“There are lots of people with lots of money invested here, and they are not just going to give that up,“ General Nicholson said. “Now is the heavy lifting. We have to convince a very skeptical population that we are here to help them.”

A steady flow of Taliban attacks have added to the challenge. After the February offensive, the Marines used cash payments to prod more than 20 store owners at one bazaar in northern Marja to open their doors, a key to stabilizing the area and reassuring residents.

By late March, all but five shops had closed, Major Coffman said. A prominent anti-Taliban senior elder was also gunned down in northern Marja, prompting most of the 200 people in his district to flee.

“They have completely paralyzed all the folks here,” Major Coffman said.

In another sign of how little the Marines control outside their own outposts, one week ago masked gunmen killed a 22-year-old man, Hazrat Gul, in broad daylight as he and four other Afghans built a small bridge about a third of a mile from a military base in central Marja.

Mr. Gul’s boss, an Afghan who contracted with the Marines to build the bridge, says he has been warned four times by the Taliban to stop working for the Americans.

And even as the NATO-backed Mr. Zahir struggles to gain credibility as Marja’s leader, the Taliban are working to fortify their own local administration.

According to Colonel Sakhi, the Taliban’s governor for Marja returned to the area on Monday for the first time since the February assault and held a meeting with local elders, many of whom Mr. Zahir is trying to win over. The Taliban governor warned them not to take money from the Marines or cooperate with the Afghan government, Colonel Sakhi said.

In central Marja, where the work projects have had more success, about 2,000 Afghan men are employed by programs financed by the First Battalion, Sixth Marines, said the unit’s civil affairs leader, Maj. David Fennell.

At one of the battalion’s outposts, shipments of cash arrive regularly. The last was 10 million afghanis, or $210,000, stuffed into a rucksack. The battalion doles out $150,000 a week, Major Fennell said.

On one afternoon in late March, 40 Afghans could be seen clearing away several acres of rubble remaining from a bazaar leveled during a NATO bomb strike two years ago. The $190,000 contract is expected to take a month to complete.

But intimidation is still rife — even inside the walls of the Marines’ outpost. One woman who came to the base crouched behind a Humvee and begged for help, saying that her husband had been killed during the February operation.

First Lt. Aran Walsh offered her $1,700 worth of Afghan currency. He asked her why she hid herself.

“If they see me, they’ll inform the Taliban,” she said.

Moises Saman contributed reporting from Marja, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Rob Pegoraro - The latest Facebook fracas: Your privacy vs. its profit - washingtonpost.com

Image via CrunchBase

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, April 4, 2010; G04

The signs of a new season surround us: Flowers are blooming, trees are budding, and another Facebook privacy fracas is brewing.

The last event kicked off a week ago, when the popular social network posted a note on its blog about "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites.

This possible change didn't exactly get a charitable read in reactions like "Facebook's Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For," and "Facebook Planning To Give Away Your Data To 'Partners.' "

How bad could things get for the 400 million-plus Facebook users when this test begins a few months from now?

Image by Trucknroll via Flickr

The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there?

As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. . . . This is not empowering."

(Before I go further, a few disclaimers: Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors; Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is on leave to run for political office, is a friend of mine from college; and many Post staffers, myself included, use public Facebook pages to connect with readers.)

The upside isn't quite as clear.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt and product director Bret Taylor said the Palo Alto, Calif., company wanted to expand its utility. In this experiment, Facebook would build on its Facebook Connect system (in which people can sign into sites such as The Post's with their Facebook accounts) to help other companies greet Facebook users with a taste of its social network.

For example, Taylor suggested that if a Facebook friend posted a link to a song on his wall and you clicked over to the record label's site, the label could tell you which Facebook pals liked the song.

This test would come with limits. You'd have to be logged into Facebook in the same browser to get any such personalized welcome elsewhere, less than 10 sites would be invited into the program at first, and each of them would have to let you easily opt out (after which each would have to delete any data Facebook had shared about you). Facebook would also provide a universal opt-out for the entire program.

To its credit, Facebook hasn't tried to spring this change on people. Beyond that blog post, it has invited users to comment on proposed changes to its privacy policy and "statement of rights and responsibilities" -- then provided a marked-up version of each showing text that has been removed and added, a step few other sites bother to take.

The reaction to that prior disclosure could indicate how worked up people really are about the changes. The relevant part of the new privacy policy, "Information You Share With Third Parties," had drawn only 211 comments early Thursday.

More important, consider what's happened since Facebook made far more user data public by default in December. According to Schnitt, 33.9 percent of Facebook users had changed their privacy settings one way or another, even though the site required all of them to confirm, decline or edit its suggested options. Since then, 50 million more people have joined Facebook.

You can't chalk all of that up to audience obliviousness.

Perhaps Facebook users have decided that with so many people on the site, their own data get lost in the collective noise -- sort of the way living in a big city affords some enforced anonymity.

Some might have learned to think like publicists on Facebook. They dial back how much information they post, they only write status updates that beg for publicity (think of all the political manifestoes you've seen), or they create second accounts for their work identities (an action Facebook's user agreement prohibits).

Or maybe Facebook's executives are correct in assuming that people don't want as much privacy online, as founder Mark Zuckerberg said in January. (He did not say that privacy was dead, nor does he seem to think that; his own Facebook profile informs strangers that "Mark only shares some of his profile information with everyone.")

But even if all of those theories are true, changing the rules to share people's information without advance permission crosses a line. If the benefits of this openness are as obvious as Facebook suggests, this new option should sell itself to the same people who let Google's computers read their Gmail, then publicize their pastimes on Foursquare. And if this experiment is as limited as Facebook suggests, the company won't forgo much revenue if it eases off on its launch.

In the meantime, I'll stay on the site -- as a journalist, it's implausible not to. But it would help to see some sign that this company will go to the mat to defend its users' rights, even if that means jeopardizing its profits. It's not too late for Facebook to pick a fight with China, is it?

Living with technology, or trying to? Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

New adversary in U.S. drug war: Contract killers for Mexican cartels - washingtonpost.com

Image by erjkprunczyk via Flickr

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 4, 2010; A01

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.

The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 killings in the city in the past year.

Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.

"Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization," said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso division. "They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it."

Image by charlie llewellin via Flickr

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, "Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars."

The mayor of Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars for the assassins' use. The mayor received a death threat recently in a note left beside a pig's head in the city.

Arabit said investigators have no evidence to suggest the Barrio Azteca gang includes former military personnel or police. It is, however, working for the Juarez cartel, which includes La Linea, an enforcement element composed in part of former Juarez police officers, according to Mexican officials.

"There has to be some form of training going on," said an anti-gang detective with the El Paso sheriff's department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. "I don't know who, and I don't know where. But how else would you explain how they operate?"

On March 13, Lesley Enriquez Redelfs, 35, who worked for the U.S. Consulate in Juarez, and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, 34, a deputy in the El Paso sheriff's department and a detention officer at the county jail, were returning home to El Paso from a children's party sponsored by the U.S. consul in Juarez. As their white sport-utility vehicle neared the international bridge that sunny Saturday afternoon, they were attacked by gunmen in at least two chase cars. When police arrived, they found the couple dead in their vehicle and their infant daughter wailing in her car seat. The intersection was littered with casings from AK-47 assault rifles and 9mm guns.

Image by pmoroni via Flickr

Ten minutes before the Redelfs were killed, Jorge Alberto Ceniceros Salcido, 37, a supervisor at a Juarez assembly plant whose wife, Hilda Antillon Jimenez, also works for the U.S. Consulate, was attacked and slain in similar style. He had just left the same party and was also driving a white SUV, with his children in the car.

According to intelligence gathered in Juarez and El Paso, U.S. investigators were quick to suspect the Barrio Azteca gang in connection with what President Obama has called the "brutal murders." What was unclear, they said, was the motive. U.S. diplomats and agents have declined to describe the killings as a targeted confrontation with the U.S. government, which had been pushing to place U.S. drug intelligence officers in a Juarez police headquarters to more quickly pass along leads.

Five days after the consulate killings, the DEA unleashed in El Paso a multiagency "gang sweep" called Operation Knockdown to gather intelligence from Barrio Azteca members. Over four days, officers questioned 363 people, including about 200 gang members or their associates, and made 26 felony arrests.

Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that the Barrio Azteca gang had given "a green light" to the retaliatory killing of U.S. law enforcement officers.

Authorities were especially interested in Eduardo Ravelo, a captain of the Barrio Azteca enterprise allegedly responsible for operations in Juarez. In October, the FBI had placed Ravelo and his mug shot on its 10-most-wanted list, though they warned that Ravelo may have had plastic surgery and altered his fingerprints. Ravelo is still at large.

DEA agents say that 27 Barrio Azteca members were detained as they tried to cross from El Paso to Juarez during Operation Knockdown, evidence of gang members' fluid movement between the two countries.

This week, authorities announced that Mexican soldiers, using information from the FBI and other sources, had arrested Ricardo Valles de la Rosa, an Azteca sergeant, in Juarez.

Valles's confession was obtained at a military base where he was allegedly beaten, according to his attorney, a public defender. He has not been charged in the consulate killings, though he is charged with killing rival gang members, including members of an enterprise known as the Artistic Assassins, or "Double A's," who operate as contract killers for the Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa is vying for control of billion dollar drug-trafficking routes through the Juarez-El Paso corridor.

In his statements, Valles said he was told through a chain of letters and phone calls from Barrio Azteca leaders in the El Paso county jail and their associates that gang leaders wanted Redelfs, the El Paso sheriff's deputy, killed because of his treatment of Azteca members in jail and his alleged threats against them.

Valles said he tracked down Redelfs at the children's party and then handed off the hit to others. He said the killing of the factory supervisor was a mistake because he was driving a white SUV similar to Redelfs's.

El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said in a statement that Valles was a career criminal and denied that Redelfs had mistreated inmates. Wiles stressed that the motives remain unknown.

Fred Burton, a former State Department special agent and now a security adviser for the Texas government, said he is suspicious of attempts to underplay the killings. "These were targeted hits done by sophisticated operators," he said. "But it is not politically expedient for either side to say that criminal organizations were behind this. That is a nightmare scenario for them."

Mexican officials say that Valles, 45, was born in Juarez but grew up in El Paso, where he lived for 30 years. Nicknamed "Chino," he was a member of the Los Fatherless street gang in El Paso. In 1995, he was convicted of distributing drugs and spent 12 years in eight U.S. federal prisons, where he met an Azteca gang leader. After his release, he was deported to Mexico and began working with the Aztecas in Juarez.

The theory that the carnage in Juarez is being stoked by rival gangs of contract killers -- the Barrio Aztecas and the Artistic Assassins -- each working for rival drug cartels makes sense to many observers.

The gangs are a binational phenomenon whose members exploit the mistrust between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, said Howard Campbell, a professor at the University of Texas in El Paso and an expert on the drug trade.

"They use the border to their advantage," Campbell said.

The Public Editor - Censored in Singapore - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

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By CLARK HOYT

LAST month, on the same day The New York Times praised Google for standing up to censorship in China, a sister newspaper, The International Herald Tribune, apologized to Singapore’s rulers and agreed to pay damages because it broke a 1994 legal agreement and referred to them in a way they did not like.

The rulers had sued for defamation 16 years ago, saying a Herald Tribune Op-Ed column had implied that they got their jobs through nepotism. The paper wound up paying $678,000 and promising not to do it again. But in February, it named Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister now, in an Op-Ed article about Asian political dynasties.

After the Lees objected, the paper said its language “may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended.” The Herald Tribune, wholly owned by The New York Times Company, apologized for “any distress or embarrassment” suffered by the Lees. The statement was published in the paper and on the Web site it shares with The Times.

Some readers were astonished that a news organization with a long history of standing up for First Amendment values would appear to bow obsequiously to an authoritarian regime that makes no secret of its determination to cow critics, including Western news organizations, through aggressive libel actions. Singapore’s leaders use a local court system in which, according to Stuart Karle, a former general counsel of The Wall Street Journal, they have never lost a libel suit.

The notion that it could be defamatory to call a political family a dynasty seems ludicrous in the United States, where The Times has routinely applied the label to the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. But Singapore is a different story.

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Lee Kuan Yew once testified, according to The Times, that he designed the draconian press laws to make sure that “journalists will not appear to be all-wise, all-powerful, omnipotent figures.” Four years ago, The Times quoted his son as saying, “If you don’t have the law of defamation, you would be like America, where people say terrible things about the president and it can’t be proved.”

Steven Brostoff of Arlington, Va., wondered whether The Times had other agreements like the one with the Lees, and asked, “What conclusions should we draw about how news coverage from these countries is slanted?” Zeb Raft of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, asked if The Times was admitting that certain world leaders “deserve to be treated with deference. This is the implication of the apology.”

George Freeman, a Times Company lawyer, said the 1994 agreement was the only one he knew about and that it applied only to The Herald Tribune. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said, “Nobody in this company has ever told me what our reporters can write — or not write — about Singapore.” He said the Times newsroom has no agreements with any government about what can be reported. “We don’t work that way.”

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said, “If we have something that needs to be said on the editorial or Op-Ed pages, on any subject, we will say it, clearly and honestly.”

That is what the late William Safire did on the Op-Ed page in 2002, when he criticized Bloomberg News for “kowtowing to the Lee family” by apologizing for an article about the elevation of the younger Lee’s wife to run a state-owned investment company. Bloomberg, he said, had “just demeaned itself and undermined the cause of a free online press.”

Safire wrote that he took “loud exception” in 1994 when The Herald Tribune, then owned jointly by the Times Company and The Washington Post Company, “cravenly caved” over an article by Philip Bowring — the same Hong Kong-based columnist who sparked last month’s dust-up. “I doubt such a sellout of principle will happen again.”

Richard Simmons was the president of The Herald Tribune in 1994 and authorized the agreement that was broken last month — an “undertaking” by the company’s lawyers to prevent a repetition of the language that offended the Lees. “We had, in my view, no choice,” he said. “What the American media absolutely refuse to recognize is Singapore operates on a different set of legal rules than does the United States.” He said Western news organizations can accept the legal system there or leave.

For The Herald Tribune and all the other news organizations that have paid damages to Singapore’s rulers (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg) or had their circulation limited there (Time, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Economist), the choice has been to stay.

Singapore is tiny, with a population of around five million, but it has outsized economic power as a financial hub, making it an important source of news. For The Herald Tribune, the economic stakes are large: more than 10 percent of its Asian circulation is in Singapore. It prints papers there that are distributed throughout the region. It sells advertising to companies throughout Asia that want to reach readers in Singapore.

“If you want to be a global paper, it has lots of banks, lots of commerce, a highly educated, English-speaking population,” said Karle. “It’s hard to turn your back on that.”

Faced with this predicament when the Lees objected to the article last month, The Herald Tribune apologized and paid up — $114,000 — before it was even sued. Karle said the paper could have spent a million dollars for a worse result in court: forced to pay higher damages and make a more humiliating apology.

But settling the way it did has its own price. Roby Alampay, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, told Agence France-Presse, “This continuing line of major media organizations too quick to offer contrition and money is a sad sight and a persisting insult on legitimate journalism, fair commentary, free speech and the rights that Singaporeans deserve.”

Safire told The American Journalism Review in 1995 that the world’s free press should unite and pull out of Singapore in the face of any new libel action. I think that is what should happen too, but it never has.

That leaves the Times Company with its own choice if another challenge arises. “Singapore is an important market for The International Herald Tribune,” the company told me in a statement. “There are more than 12,000 I.H.T. readers who shouldn’t be deprived of the right to read the paper in print or online. In addition, getting kicked out of Singapore would also make it more difficult for others in the region to get the I.H.T. since we print in Singapore for distribution there and in the neighboring areas.”

Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.

E-mail: public@nytimes.com.