Starting Points

Apr 6, 2010

Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages - NYTimes.com

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus.

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”

The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”

The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the relatively small number of potential speakers and the difficulty in persuading a new generation to participate. There has been progress, though, said Leanne Hinton, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who created the Breath of Life program in California in 1992 to revive dormant languages in the state.

Representatives from at least 25 languages with no native speakers have participated in the group’s workshops so far, she said. Last month Ms. Hinton and a colleague at Yale received a federal grant to create a similar program based in Washington, D.C.

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Some reclamation efforts have shown success. Daryl Baldwin started working to revive the dormant language of the Miami Nation in the Midwest (part of the Algonquian language family), and taught his own children to speak it fluently. He now directs the Myaamia Project at Miami University in Ohio, a joint effort between academics and the Miami tribe.

Farther east is Stephanie Fielding, a member of the Connecticut Mohegans and an adviser on the Stony Brook project. She has devoted her life to bringing her tribe’s language back to life and is compiling a dictionary and grammar book. In her eyes language provides a mental telescope into the world of her ancestors. She notes, for example, that in an English conversation, a statement is typically built with the first person — “I” — coming first. In the same statement in Mohegan, however, “you” always comes first, even when the speaker is the subject.

“This suggests a more communally minded culture,” she said.

Now in her 60s, Ms. Fielding knows firsthand just how tough it is to sustain a language effort over time, however. She said she was still not fluent.

“In order for a language to survive and resurrect,” she said, “it needs people talking it, and for people to talk it, there has to be a society that works on it.”

Chief Wallace of the Unkechaug in Long Island already has a willing student from a younger generation. Howard Treadwell, 24, graduated from Stony Brook in 2009 with a linguistics degree. He will participate in the Long Island effort while doing graduate work at the University of Arizona, where there is a specialized program researching American Indian languages.

Mr. Treadwell is one of 400 registered members of the tribe, which maintains a 52-acre reservation in Mastic, on the South Shore. The Shinnecocks have about 1,300 enrolled members and have a reservation adjacent to Southampton.

Robert D. Hoberman, the chairman of the linguistics department at Stony Book, is overseeing the academic side of the project. He is an expert in the creation of modern Hebrew, the great success story of language revival. Essentially unspoken for 2,000 years, Hebrew survived only in religious uses until early Zionists tried to update it — an undertaking adopted on a grand scale when the State of Israel was established.

For the American Indians on Long Island the task is particularly difficult because there are few records. But Shinnecock and Unkechaug are part of a family of eastern Algonquian languages. Some have both dictionaries and native speakers, Mr. Hoberman said, which the team can mine for missing words and phrases, and for grammatical structure.

The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct what the Long Island languages probably were like.” The Massachusett language, for example, is well documented with dictionaries and Bible translations.

Jefferson’s Unkechaug word list was collected on June 13, 1791, when he visited Brookhaven, Long Island, with James Madison, later his successor in the White House. He wrote that even then, only three old women remained who could still speak the language fluently.

Chief Wallace said he had many more records, including religious documents, deeds and legal transactions, and possibly a tape of some tribal members speaking in the 1940s.

“When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the community,” Mr. Hoberman said.

While it may seem impossible to recreate the sound of a lost tongue, Mr. Hoberman said the process was not all that mysterious because the dictionaries were transliterated into English.

“Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr. Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”

Surprisingly, Family Time Has Grown - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Cover via Amazon

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.

The study, by two economists at the University of California, San Diego, analyzes a dozen surveys of how Americans say they use their time, taken at different periods from 1965 to 2007. It reports that the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels — and especially those with a college education — has risen “dramatically” since the mid-1990s. (The findings by the husband-and-wife economist team of Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey appear in a discussion paper presented in March at a Brookings Institution conference in Washington.)

Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to 21.2 hours a week for college-educated women and 15.9 hours for those with less education.

Although mothers still do most of the parenting, fathers also registered striking gains: to 9.6 hours a week for college-educated men, more than double the pre-1995 rate of 4.5 hours; and to 6.8 hours for other men, up from 3.7, according to an additional analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Dan Sacks, economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Family researchers say the news should offer relief to guilt-stricken working parents.

“Parents are feeling like they don’t have enough time with their children,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, which conducts research on the work force. “It’s a function of people working so hard, and they are worried they’re shortchanging their children. I’ve never found a group of parents who believe they are spending enough time with their kids.”

Although previous studies have shown increases in parenting time starting in the 1990s, the study by the Rameys is important because it links so many time-use surveys and also breaks the data down by age of the child and education level.

The rise in child-centered time is just one of the ways the American family is changing. Couples are typically waiting longer to get married and begin having children. Divorce rates are dropping with each generation.

And notably, children are no longer so widely viewed as essential to a happy marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans said that children were “very important” to a successful marriage, but by 2007, the number of adults who agreed with that statement had dropped to 41 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

In fact, the surge in parenting time may say more about modern marriage than about modern child care practices, Dr. Stevenson said. She notes that among college-educated parents, two- to two-and-a-half hours of the increased time takes place when both parents are together. “Everybody gets in the car,” she said, “and mom and dad both cheer on the kid.”

That may reflect a rise in what Dr. Stevenson calls the “hedonic marriage,” in which couples share home and work responsibilities so they can spend more time together.

By contrast, couples from earlier generations typically had “specialized” roles that tended to keep them apart — the husband working at a job to support the family, the wife staying home to raise the children.

“We’re seeing a rise in marriages where we’re picking people we like to do activities with,” Dr. Stevenson said. “So it’s not surprising we’re going to see that some of the activities we want do together involve our children.”

So where is the extra time coming from? Women, in particular, are spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are putting in fewer hours at the office. A 2007 report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics showed that leisure time among men and women surged four to eight hours a week from 1965 to 2003.

Notably, the data in the Ramey study do not count the hours mothers and fathers spend “around” their children — at the dinner table, for example, or in solitary play. Instead, the survey tracks specific activities in which the parent is directly involved in the child’s care.

“It’s taking them to school, helping with homework, bathing them, playing catch with them in the back yard,” said a co-author of the leisure-time paper, Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Those are the activities that have increased over the last 15 to 20 years.”

Dr. Galinsky notes that although working parents typically feel guilty for not spending more time at home, children often have a different reaction. In a landmark study published as “Ask the Children” (Harper, 2000), she asked more than 1,000 children about their “one wish” for their parents. Although parents expected their children would wish for more family time, the children wanted something different.

“Kids were more likely to wish that their parents were less tired and less stressed,” Dr. Galinsky said.

Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country.

The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.

“Over the years, in a variety of international arenas,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very proud of that.’

“It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye.”

Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in their counterattacks.

The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he calls the “Goldstone effect,” meaning the delegitimization of Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.

Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the war, as selectively anti-Israel.

Some international rights groups that have been critical of Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was “waging a propaganda war” to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”

Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a growing climate of repression.

In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in late March, and released three days later.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.

Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ — the first part of Theodor Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.

Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.

Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with a horn attached to her forehead (in Hebrew, the word for fund also means horn) and bore the legend “Naomi Goldstone Hazan.”

Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against.

Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. “Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs,” said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. “They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny.”

But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.

Right-wing organizations like those encouraging Jewish settlement in Arab areas of East Jerusalem receive the overwhelming share of their financing from individuals and philanthropies whose identities are often not disclosed.

For now, the bill has effectively been blocked until its proponents reach agreement with the Labor ministers in the governing coalition, who are trying to water it down.

But Ms. Chazan said the bill could not be finessed.

“This law has to disappear,” she said. “It is the single most dangerous threat to Israeli civil society since its inception.”

For Ms. Chazan, a vibrant and diverse civil society is the bedrock of Israeli democracy, and what being Israeli is all about. “We love this country and we want it to be decent,” she said. “We believe the more decent Israel is, the better chance it has of surviving.”

But Mr. Steinberg says that organizations like the New Israel Fund, with their deep pockets and multiple petitions to Israel’s Supreme Court, have “distorted the marketplace of ideas.”

“Part of what is going on now,” he said, “is a sense that this is getting out of control.”

Israeli Gag Order Begins to Slip in Security Leak Case - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case.

A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it must be fought, and stirring a public furor.

The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service.

Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal Haaretz newspaper, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.

Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.

Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media has so far made only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave from Walla!, without explaining why.

The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 edition that readers search the Internet with keywords “Israeli journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by the American journalist Judith Miller on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.

If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.

The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began to emerge in mid March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers Guardian and Independent newspapers and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.

According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding in Britain”.

The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the extremist Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.

However Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the two militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.

Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military is permitted to carry out preemptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.

Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the Israeli Press Council said the gag order handed down by a magistrate’s court was “regrettable,” and should be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about the imposition of such gag orders, though the court ruling still prevented any discussion of the actual case.

Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the authorities could more easily pressure the suspect to accept some measure of guilt, arrive at a plea bargain and settle the case “with no noise.”

Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized the ease with which courts in Israel hand out gag orders.

“Only the poor Hebrew readers do not know what is going on,” he said of Israelis unable to read foreign reports about the case in English. “It is an absurd situation,” he said.

The Haaretz newspaper and Israel’s Channel 10 are fighting to lift the gag order. Mibi Moser, the lawyer representing Haaretz, said there would be a court hearing on the matter on April 12, if the gag order was not lifted before.

Mr. Moser is also representing Mr. Blau of Haaretz, though he refused to give any details of that aspect of the case.

Rebel Ambush Kills at Least 73 Indian Officers - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JIM YARDLEY

NEW DELHI — India’s campaign against the country’s Maoist insurgency suffered a major setback on Tuesday when rebel fighters ambushed a paramilitary unit on patrol in an isolated forest region, killing at least 73 officers.

The authorities described a carefully executed surprise attack in which the Maoists opened fire as the patrol entered an area seeded with booby-trap bombs. When officers fell to the ground to take cover from gunfire, they detonated the explosives.

“Something has gone very wrong,” said Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, according to the news agency Press Trust of India. “I am deeply shocked.”

He said the attack by the Maoist fighters showed the “brutality and the savagery they are capable of.”

The attack comes as the government is mobilizing security forces against the Maoists in a multistate campaign known as Operation Green Hunt. The Maoists, also known as Naxalites, have existed in India for four decades and claim to represent the interests of the rural dispossessed who have not shared in India’s economic progress. Once lightly regarded by the government, the Maoists have expanded across a large rural corridor and now exercise outright control over some isolated, mountain regions. Maoist propaganda calls for overthrowing the Indian state.

The goal of the government operation is to push the Maoists out of more populated rural areas and isolate them in certain remote mountain regions. Maoist sympathizers have accused the government of brutalizing and killing innocent villagers as security forces sweep through rural areas to root out rebel fighters.

Officials say the Maoists are the ones who brutalize, having disrupted schools and hospitals and destroyed roads in many areas; the security campaign calls for clearing areas of rebels so that government services can be restored.

Image by Shreyans Bhansali via Flickr

By some unofficial estimates, roughly 200 security officers have been killed by Maoists during the past 12 months. The operation involves multiple federal and state security agencies, and some analysts have questioned whether poor coordination and training is exposing officers to danger. On Sunday, Maoists detonated a land mine in the state of Orissa, killing 10 officers and wounding 16 others. Last month, the Maoists blew up a railroad track, forcing the minor derailment of a passenger train. And in February, about 100 Maoists on motorcycles stormed a police outpost in the state of West Bengal, killing 24 security officers.

The attack on Tuesday occurred in the Dantewada region in the state of Chhattisgarh, in an area known as Chintalnar, considered a major Maoist stronghold. The officers were members of the Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary unit, who entered the forest on Sunday night for a two-day mission related to the government operation.

T. J. Longkumar, the Chhattisgarh police inspector general for the larger region, said the officers were returning to camp after an early morning patrol when the Maoists struck around 6:30 a.m. Officer Longkumar said he did not know how many fighters had attacked, but Indian news outlets reported that as many as 1,000 Maoists were involved.

“They were blasted,” Officer Longkumar said. “Most of the casualties were from the explosives.”

He said the attack was probably a response to security forces pressing deeper into isolated areas once completely controlled by the Maoists. “They have regrouped,” he said. “They feel we are entering their core area.”

Saimah Khwaja contributed research.

Human rights report threatens aid to Pakistan - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2010; A06

ISLAMABAD -- The Pakistani army has allegedly committed hundreds of retaliatory killings and other ongoing human rights abuses in the Swat Valley since the end of its successful anti-Taliban offensive there in September, threatening billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to a crucial ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said it had documented the extrajudicial execution of as many as 300 alleged Taliban supporters and sympathizers in the area around Mingora, the Swat capital, in interviews with more than 100 Swat families in February and March. A report on the alleged abuses, including torture, home demolitions, illegal detentions and disappearances, is scheduled for release this month.

Based on a continuing pattern, "we can only assume it is part of the counterterrorism effort by the security forces to shoot people in the back of the head," said Ali Dayan Hasan, the organization's senior South Asia analyst.

The Obama administration has been aware of reports of abuse since last summer, U.S. officials in Washington said, even as it has strengthened its relationship with Pakistan. Last month, the administration held a "strategic dialogue" with top Pakistani military and government officials.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Monday that "we take allegations of human rights abuses seriously" and that the U.S. military was "working with the Pakistanis" to address the situation and that progress was being made.

A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the administration has provided Congress with regular updates on the allegations since last summer as well as on steps taken to address them. "We are mindful of the legislative requirements," the official said.

Most U.S. aid to Pakistan falls under congressional restrictions requiring the administration to certify the country's adherence to human rights laws and norms. Since 2002, the United States has provided $11.6 billion in military aid and $6 billion in development assistance, according to Congressional Research Service figures. The administration has requested an additional $3 billion in combined aid for 2011.

Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas denied allegations of abuse, saying that the military had invited human rights groups to investigate earlier charges during the June-to-September offensive in the former Taliban stronghold. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, he said, issued written directives ordering troops operating in Swat and other regions to respect the rule of law.

"If we are seen as becoming terrorists against the terrorists," Abbas said, "all we have gained will go up in the air." He suggested that reported killings or other abuses were the result of "scores being settled between the people and the Taliban," many of whom remain in the mountains surrounding settled areas in Swat.

Image by Cecilia... via Flickr

The army is holding about 2,500 detainees from counterinsurgency operations in Swat and elsewhere in the north and west, about 1,000 of them in Swat. The military has no judicial arm to prosecute them and has complained that Pakistan's slow-moving civilian judiciary was unable to handle them.

Hasan, of Human Rights Watch, said the military has not released the names of those being held or allowed outside access to them.

Despite the abuse allegations, the army presence appears to have the support of many Swat residents. In Mingora, members of the military could be seen rebuilding roads, schools and libraries, buying computers for women's vocational institutes and providing solar-powered streetlights to villages, in the absence of government reconstruction efforts.

The Swat offensive marked the start of several major Pakistani military operations against strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban, which the Obama administration says is tied to al-Qaeda and to Taliban forces fighting in Afghanistan. About 150,000 Pakistani army troops have been involved in operations in Swat and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghanistan border, including Bajur and South Waziristan.

The administration has urged Pakistan to extend full offensive operations into North Waziristan, Orakzai and Khyber regions of the FATA, which it has described as havens for al-Qaeda leaders and the Taliban-allied insurgent network of Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

U.S. officials have also worked to develop close ties with the Pakistani military, which has ruled the country for nearly half of Pakistan's 63-year existence and has an uneasy relationship with the civilian government. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visits Pakistan regularly, as does Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Image via Wikipedia

Under a $7.5 billion, five-year economic and development aid package signed by President Obama in October, the secretary of state must certify that the military is "not materially and substantially subverting the political or judicial processes of Pakistan" -- a provision that drew sharp protests from the Pakistani military, which charged that it interferes in the country's internal affairs.

Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and national security adviser James L. Jones have met with the army chief, Kiyani, as well as civilian leaders, during recent visits to Pakistan, as has Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored the new developmental aid package. An aide said Kerry had raised the human rights allegations "with senior Pakistani officials" during a trip in February.

Hasan said Human Rights Watch had investigated about a third of the abuse reports the group had received from the Mingora area and found most of them substantiated. "Certainly, some of these people are Taliban supporters and sympathizers," he said of Swat, but many are "caught in the middle."

The group has been unable to verify the military units involved in alleged abuses, as required by U.S. law before a cutoff of aid.

CQ - Behind the Lines for Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Image by taiyofj via Flickr

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Stockholm syndrome: "Maybe she's forgotten who she is -- or was," Arizona columnist muses of ex-governor Napolitano's reluctance to reinforce border . . . What's in a name: "The irony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's acronym has never been lost on anyone, including the agency itself" . . . Bad CEO, no doughnut: "Despite growing awareness of how devastating a cyber-attack could be, many businesses still haven't implemented security measures." These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

---------------------------------

“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.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security