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Editorial: Temptation Along the Border Just as surely as the sky is blue, law enforcement in Mexico is corrupt. That assumption may too often be true, but it is incomplete. A federal sting that exposed surprising openness to bribery among U.S. soldiers and law enforcement officers on the U.S.-Mexico border ought to turn on a light bulb. Recent stories by The Times' Ralph Vartabedian showed that Army National Guard Humvees were used to deliver hundreds of pounds of cocaine to an Arizona hotel. A federal inspector waved trucks he believed to be carrying drugs safely across the border. Uniformed national guardsmen lugged kilos of coke into the U.S. in their official vehicles. Even the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration organizers of the sting, which was conducted in stages from 2002 through 2004, were taken aback by the numbers and eagerness of the bribe-seekers. Higher-level officials are apparently not immune. A federal grand jury Tuesday indicted a former immigration service intelligence chief in San Diego on charges of covering up a drug and immigrant smuggling ring. Even Forest Service rangers have been caught smuggling marijuana in Arizona....
Audit Finds Security Dept. Is Lacking Disaster Backups In a nationwide advertising blitz, the Homeland Security Department has urged businesses and families to "Get Ready Now" for potential terror attacks or other disasters. But an internal audit released on Wednesday concluded that the department had fundamentally failed to follow its own advice. Computer systems at 19 department sites that served agencies like the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard had no functioning backups or relied on obviously deficient or incomplete backups, the report by the inspector general of the department said. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is in charge of disaster recovery, was unprepared, the report said....
Reformers Turn Up the Heat on the FBI Pressure to overhaul the FBI mounted Tuesday when House budget negotiators ordered the bureau to embrace the recommendations of a presidential commission on intelligence failures that would likely erode the FBI's independence. The powerful House Appropriations Committee acted a day after a former member of another commission, the bipartisan panel that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, expressed concern that the FBI had failed to make sufficient progress in recasting itself since the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Tuesday's action by the normally supportive congressional committee, in language attached to an FBI budget bill, sends a blunt message to the bureau that lawmakers consider the progress to be unacceptable....
Ruling Limits Prosecutions of People Who Violate Law on Privacy of Medical Records An authoritative new ruling by the Justice Department sharply limits the government's ability to prosecute people for criminal violations of the law that protects the privacy of medical records. The criminal penalties, the department said, apply to insurers, doctors, hospitals and other providers - but not necessarily their employees or outsiders who steal personal health data. In short, the department said, people who work for an entity covered by the federal privacy law are not automatically covered by that law and may not be subject to its criminal penalties, which include a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison for the most serious violations. The reasoning is that federal regulations establish the standards for medical privacy. The regulations apply just to "covered entities," including insurers and health care providers. Thus, only covered entities can be prosecuted for criminal violations of the law....
Crime Drops, Despite Expiration of Gun Ban So much for "anti-gun hysterics" and predictions of "blood running in the streets," a Second Amendment group says. Nine months after the Clinton-era "assault weapons ban" expired, the FBI has released crime statistics showing a drop in homicides in 2004 -- the first such drop since 1999. The FBI report said all types of violent crime declined last year, and cities with more than a million people showed the largest drops in violent crime. When the Clinton ban on certain semiautomatic weapons expired last September, gun control groups warned that violent crime would escalate, including violence against children. But those "doom and gloom" forecasts have been exposed as "pure clap-trap," said Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) President Joe Tartaro. "Where is the news media on this?" Tartaro wondered. He said if the number of homicides had gone up, reporters would be writing front-page stories linking the rise to the end of the semi-auto ban....
Bush pushes Congress to renew anti-terrorism law President Bush urged the U.S. Congress on Thursday to renew major provisions of the USA Patriot Act and rejected critics who have complained the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism law erodes civil liberties. Sixteen sections of the Patriot Act are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and the Bush administration fears their expiration will weaken law-enforcement tools needed to search for potential terrorists on American soil. "My message to Congress is clear: The terrorist threats against us will not expire at the end of the year, and neither should the protections of the Patriot Act," Bush said during a visit to the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy....
Report Shows FBI Missed at Least Five Chances Before Sept. 11 to Uncover Info About Terrorists The FBI missed at least five opportunities before the Sept. 11 attacks to uncover vital intelligence information about the terrorists, and the bureau didn't aggressively pursue the information it did have, the Justice Department's inspector general says in a newly released critique of government missteps. The IG faulted the FBI for not knowing about the presence of two of the Sept. 11 terrorists in the United States and for not following up on an agent's theory that Osama bin Laden was sending students to U.S. flight training schools. The agent's theory turned out to be precisely what bin Laden did. "The way the FBI handled these matters was a significant failure that hindered the FBI's chances of being able to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks," Inspector General Glenn Fine said. When the bureau did discover the presence of hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar in the United States shortly before the attacks, "the FBI's investigation then was conducted without much urgency or priority," the report concluded. The five missed opportunities in regard to the two hijackers stemmed from information sharing problems between the FBI and CIA and problems inside the FBI's counterterrorism program....

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