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Border agents accused of taking bribes

Two U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to prosecute immigrant smugglers were arrested for allegedly releasing border-crossers in exchange for $300,000 in cash bribes. Mario Alvarez, 44, and Samuel McClaren, 43, released the illegal immigrants to a smuggling ring that operates in El Centro, about 120 miles east of San Diego, according to a federal complaint filed in January and unsealed Thursday. The smugglers then allegedly took the migrants to Los Angeles. The agents "who are supposed to represent the very best, epitomize the very worst," said Daniel Dzwilewski, special agent in charge of the FBI in San Diego. Both men, of Imperial, were charged with conspiracy, bribery, making false statements, migrant smuggling and filing false tax returns....

Two border patrol agents guilty in shooting

The two Border Patrol agents who shot an admitted drug smuggler in the buttocks last year near Fabens were found guilty Wednesday of several counts of assault, weapons crimes, tampering and deprivation of civil rights and face a minimum of 10 years in prison. The verdict, reached after two weeks of trial and two days of deliberation, was met with shock and tears by the families of agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean. Compean and Ramos were found guilty of assault with serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, a civil rights charge and obstruction of justice. The jury acquitted them of assault with intent to commit murder. Compean and Ramos' boss, Robert W. Gilbert, the chief patrol agent for the El Paso sector of the Border Patrol, issued a written statement Wednesday saying the agents "choose to violate the trust of the citizens they swore to protect."....

Border Patrol may be ordered to hire 12K

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved ordering the Border Patrol to hire 12,000 new agents in the next two years, more than doubling the current force. Border Patrol officials and experts say that number exceeds what the agency can handle in terms of training and the panel didn't include any money to fund the new hires. Yesterday lawmakers pushed ahead with immigration reform plans, hoping to finish work by the March 27 deadline imposed by GOP leaders. Along with more agents, they propose replacing old fences along the border with 25 miles of new barricades in the desert west of Naco. They put off action on contentious issues such as whether to make illegal presence in the United States a federal crime. Adding 12,000 agents in two years would require significant appropriations from Congress. "Is this a sincere effort, or is this just political posturing?" asked T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union for 10,500 agents. "I'm afraid that it falls into the latter category."....

Four Current and Former U.S. Soldiers Agree to Plead Guilty to Participating in Bribery and Extortion Conspiracy

Four additional current and former U.S. soldiers have agreed to plead guilty to participating in a widespread bribery and extortion conspiracy which operated from January 2002 through March 2004, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division announced today. The charges arise from Operation Lively Green, an undercover investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that began in December 2001. Forty seven have already pleaded guilty in this ongoing prosecution and will be sentenced in June 2006. In documents filed today in federal court in Tucson, Ariz., the defendants agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to enrich themselves by obtaining cash bribes from persons they believed to be narcotics traffickers who were in fact Special Agents of the FBI in return for the defendants using their official positions to assist, protect and participate in the activities of an illegal narcotics trafficking organization engaged in the business of transporting and distributing cocaine from Arizona to other locations in the southwestern United States. In order to protect the shipments of cocaine, the defendants wore official uniforms; and carried official forms of identification; used official vehicles; and used their color of authority where necessary to prevent police stops, searches and seizures of the narcotics as they drove the cocaine shipments on highways that passed through checkpoints manned by the U.S. Border Patrol, the Arizona Department of Public Safety and Nevada law enforcement officers. All of the defendants escorted at least one shipment of cocaine from locations such as Nogales, Ariz. and Tucson, Ariz. to destinations which included Phoenix, Ariz. and Las Vegas, Nev....

Mandatory Guard-on-border bill is vetoed

There won't be any National Guard troops in Southern Arizona — at least not yet. As vowed, Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoed a $10 million appropriation for the Guard because it ordered her to put the troops on the border. In a five-paragraph letter to legislators, she cited a state constitutional provision that makes her commander-in-chief of the Guard. "The Legislature has no constitutional or other authority to control when or how the Guard is deployed," she said. But Napolitano insisted she's still interested in putting troops in Southern Arizona and promised that if lawmakers send her a bill with the funds — but without the mandate — she would sign it and begin deployment. That option may already be in progress. On Thursday the House gave preliminary approval to another bill to appropriate funds to deploy Guard troops in Southern Arizona for "border security functions." The new bill has none of the language the governor found offensive. Napolitano has already signed an executive order posting troops in Southern Arizona, conditioned on getting some money....

Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations

The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said. While some of these instances were considered technical glitches, the report, from the department's inspector general, characterized others as "significant," including wiretaps that were much broader in scope than approved by a court and others that were allowed to continue for weeks or sometimes months longer than was authorized. In one instance, the F.B.I. received the full content of 181 telephone calls as part of an intelligence investigation, instead of merely the billing and toll records as authorized, the report found. In a handful of cases, it said, the bureau conducted physical searches that had not been properly authorized. The inspector general's findings come at a time of fierce Congressional debate over the program of wiretapping without warrants that the National Security Agency has conducted. That program, approved by President Bush, is separate from the F.B.I. wiretaps reviewed in the report, and the inspector general's office concluded that it did not have the jurisdiction to review the legality or operations of the N.S.A. effort. But, the report disclosed, the Justice Department has opened reviews into two other controversial counterterrorism tactics that the department has widely employed since the Sept. 11 attacks. In one, the inspector general has begun looking into the F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, to demand records and documents without warrants in terror investigations. Some critics maintain that the bureau has abused its subpoena powers to demand records in thousands of cases....

Pentagon admits errors in spying on protesters

The Department of Defense admitted in a letter obtained by NBC News on Thursday that it had wrongly added peaceful demonstrators to a database of possible domestic terrorist threats. The letter followed an NBC report focusing on the Defense Department’s Threat and Local Observation Notice, or TALON, report. Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Roger W. Rogalski’s letter came in reply to a memo from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who had demanded answers about the process of identifying domestic protesters as suspicious and removing their names when they are wrongly listed. “The recent review of the TALON Reporting System ... identified a small number of reports that did not meet the TALON reporting criteria. Those reports dealt with domestic anti-military protests or demonstrations potentially impacting DoD facilities or personnel,” Rogalski wrote on Wednesday. “While the information was of value to military commanders, it should not have been retained in the Cornerstone database.” In 2003, the Defense Department directed a little-known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established TALON at that time. The original NBC News report, from December, focused on a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a 10-month period. One such incident was a small group of activists meeting in a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., to plan a protest against military recruiting at local high schools. In his Wednesday letter, Rogalski said such anomalies in the TALON database had been removed. “They did not pertain to potential foreign terrorist activity and thus should never have been entered into the Cornerstone database. These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given,” Rogalski wrote....

Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say

Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism. The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month. The resolution, which underscored the government's broad legal authority to intercept electronic communications, comes as debate is raging over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the duties of Internet providers to protect personal data. A magistrate judge in Orlando, James Glazebrook, first questioned the so-called nationwide-search provision in 2003, after investigators in a child pornography probe asked him to issue a search warrant requiring a "legitimate" California-based Web site to identify all users who accessed certain "password-protected" photos posted on the site. The Web provider was not named in public court records. Magistrate Glazebrook said that in passing the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Congress made clear its focus was on terrorism. He said there was nothing in the language Congress adopted in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that suggested the nationwide-search provision should apply to garden variety federal cases. "The statutory language is clear and unambiguous in limiting district court authority to issue out-of-district warrants to investigations of terrorism, and that language controls this court's interpretation. The government has shown no legislative intent to the contrary," the magistrate wrote. He also noted that many of the examples given during legislative debate involved terrorism. The then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, described the nationwide-search language as applying in terrorism cases, the court noted. Magistrate Glazebrook denied the search warrant, but it was recently disclosed that the government appealed to a federal judge, G. Kendall Sharp, who granted it without explanation. The scenario played out again late last year, after prosecutors presented Magistrate Glazebrook with an application for a search warrant directed to a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal, Yahoo....

US rights groups ask courts to end domestic spying

Civil liberties groups on Thursday asked federal courts to halt the Bush administration's controversial program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violated the privacy and free speech rights of U.S. citizens. The requests for court-ordered injunctions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit and by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York were an extension of legal challenges the two groups had filed in January. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in January against the National Security Agency on behalf of scholars, attorneys, journalists and nonprofit groups that regularly communicate by phone and e-mail with people in the Middle East. Separately, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided legal aid to people detained or interrogated in Washington's declared war on terrorism, filed a parallel suit in a federal court in New York challenging the wiretapping program. A CCR lawyer said on Thursday that U.S. officials had already disclosed enough to prove to a federal judge that the NSA wiretapping involving U.S. citizens was unconstitutional. "We can file this aggressive motion because we have proof that the spying program is illegal," said CCR staff lawyer Shayana Kadidal. "The bottom line is the defendants have incriminated themselves -- President Bush admitted that he authorized and oversaw an illegal and unconstitutional program."....

G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants

The plan by Senate Republicans to step up oversight of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program would also give legislative sanction for the first time to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, legal experts said on Wednesday. Civil liberties advocates called the proposed oversight inadequate and the licensing of eavesdropping without warrants unnecessary and unwise. But the Republican senators who drafted the proposal said it represented a hard-wrung compromise with the White House, which strongly opposed any Congressional interference in the eavesdropping program. The Republican proposal appeared likely to win approval from the full Senate, despite Democratic opposition and some remaining questions from Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The Republican proposal would give Congressional approval to the eavesdropping program much as it was secretly authorized by Mr. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks, with limited notification to a handful of Congressional leaders. The N.S.A. would be permitted to intercept the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States if there was "probable cause to believe that one party to the communication is a member, affiliate, or working in support of a terrorist group or organization," according to a written summary of the proposal issued by its Republican sponsors. The finding of probable cause would not be reviewed by any court. But after 45 days, the attorney general would be required to drop the eavesdropping on that target, seek a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or explain under oath to two new Congressional oversight subcommittees why he could not seek a warrant. The administration would be required to provide "full access" to information about the eavesdropping, including "operational details," to the new Senate and House subcommittees, the summary said. Each subcommittee would consist of four Republicans and three Democrats from the Intelligence Committees....

GOP deal on NSA eavesdropping would keep Americans in dark

A Republican deal is in the works to provide congressional cover for the administration's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. It is a classic example of the blind leading the blind. Negotiated by a cadre of Senate Republicans and Vice President Dick Cheney, the deal would allow the National Security Agency's electronic eavesdropping to continue, even though the public and most members of Congress have no idea what the NSA is actually doing. That's outrageous when the agency may be invading the privacy and violating the fundamental rights of Americans on a grand scale. The Senate Intelligence Committee's Republican majority rejected Democrats' call for a thorough investigation of the wiretapping authorized in secret by President George W. Bush. The handful of senators who have been briefed on the program may know what the NSA is up to, but the rest of Congress and the public have been left in the dark. You'd think elected officials would insist on knowing how many Americans have had their calls and e-mails intercepted and why. How about asking at what point, in what appears to be a data-mining operation, do people begin listening in place of computers? What and who triggers the switch? What about the breadth of the eavesdropping web? If your conversation with someone overseas is monitored, what about your subsequent calls to people inside this country? Will the NSA listen to those too? Will it tap calls made later by the people you talked to? At what point, if ever, would officials go to court for a warrant? At what point, if ever, would you know you've been tapped? What's so different about this program that oversight should be limited to seven senators instead of, at the very least, the entire 15- member intelligence committee which oversees all other sensitive intelligence operations? And finally, is it effective?....

NSA Eavesdropping and the Fourth Amendment

The political minuet being performed in recent weeks between angry members of Congress and the Bush Administration over the domestic spying program has done little if anything to assuage those of us concerned about the ongoing illegality of the program. President Bush’s order permitting the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on Americans without any judicial approval or warrant shows just how prescient our Framers were in placing controls on the executive. In this instance, the legal controls were present – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process that allows for secret judicial authorization to conduct the sort of electronic eavesdropping being conducted by NSA – but they were circumvented. The civil liberties dimensions of the NSA program have taken a legal back seat to the constitutional and statutory authority issues in these debates. Still, in the unlikely event that legal authority for the NSA program can be found, this domestic spying violates the Fourth Amendment. Administration lawyers concede that, in general, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their telephone calls, and that probable cause and a warrant are necessary under the Fourth Amendment to authorize electronic surveillance of those communications. The extent to which national security and foreign intelligence collection might be exempt from the general rule and thus subject to the lesser Fourth Amendment requirement of reasonableness has been considered carefully if not exhaustively by Congress and the judiciary. Thirty-four years ago the Supreme Court first confronted the tensions between unmonitored executive surveillance and individual freedoms in the national security setting. United States v. United States District Court (known as the Keith decision, after the Judge who first decided it)....

Watchdog: What Ever Happened to the Civil Liberties Board?

For more than a year, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been the most invisible office in the White House. Created by Congress in December 2004 as a result of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the board has never hired a staff or even held a meeting. Next week, NEWSWEEK has learned, that is due to finally change when the board's five members are slated to be sworn in at the White House and convene their first session. Board members tell NEWSWEEK the panel intends to immediately tackle contentious issues like the president's domestic wiretapping program, the Patriot Act and Pentagon data mining. But critics are furious the process has taken this long—and question whether the White House intends to treat the panel as anything more than window dressing. The delay is "outrageous, considering how long its been since the bill [creating the board] was passed," said Thomas Kean, who chaired the 9/11 Commission. "The administration was never interested in this." Renewed concerns about the White House's commitment came just a few weeks ago when President Bush's new budget was released—with no listing for money for the civil liberties board. Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, denied to NEWSWEEK the White House was trying to kill the panel by starving it of funds. "It will be fully funded," he said, explaining that the board wasn't in the budget this year because officials decided not to itemize funding levels for particular offices within the White House. When a reporter pointed out that funding for other White House offices such as the National Security Council were listed in the budget, Conant said: "I have no xplanation."....