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Federal official charged with immigration fraud A immigration supervisor in the Washington district office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was charged yesterday with immigration fraud for issuing naturalized citizenship certificates to people who didn't earn them. Robert T. Schofield appeared in a federal court in Alexandria yesterday and awaited a bond hearing today. Court papers filed in support of search warrant applications said that at least 23 persons may have illegitimately obtained naturalization certificates from Mr. Schofield. "This agency has zero tolerance for anyone who might betray the confidence of the American people by compromising the integrity of our immigration system," said Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of USCIS. "This alleged behavior in no way represents the honor and ethics of the work force at USCIS. We will continue to cooperate fully with authorities in this ongoing investigation." A spokeswoman for USCIS said Mr. Schofield has worked for the agency since 1976 and was a first line supervisory adjudications officer. That means he oversaw other immigration adjudicators who rule on applications ranging from citizenship to companies seeking permission to import foreign workers. It's the second time this month a USCIS employee was arrested in a high-profile immigration scam. The FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York announced June 7 they had arrested Phillip A. Browne, a USCIS employee who conspired with his sister to sell green cards based on sham marriages....
Ex-N.Y. Police Chief Admits to Taking Gifts Bernard B. Kerik, whose rise from New York beat cop to head of the Department of Homeland Security was derailed by ethics questions, dodged prison Friday in a plea bargain by admitting he took $165,000 in gifts from a company attempting to do business with the city. Kerik, at a 10-minute hearing in state Supreme Court in the Bronx, pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanors under a deal that allows him to continue without interruption his new career as a Middle East security consultant. Kerik acknowledged accepting renovations on his Bronx apartment from a company attempting to land city contracts -- Interstate Industrial Corp., a business reputedly linked to organized crime. And he admitted failing to report a $28,000 loan from a real estate developer, as required by city law. The transgressions occurred while Kerik was head of the city Correction Department. In entering his plea, Kerik admitted speaking to city officials about Interstate, but he never acknowledged a link between the renovations and his support of the company. Outside court, Kerik showed no sign of remorse and offered no apology....
State Tracked Protesters in the Name of Security Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties. The Times obtained reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security in recent months that contain details on the whereabouts and purpose of a number of political demonstrations throughout California. The source of the information is listed in some cases as federal law enforcement agencies, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, an investigative arm of the U.S. Homeland Security department. Political activities cited in the reports include: • An animal rights rally outside a Canadian consulate office in San Francisco to protest the hunting of seals. • A demonstration in Walnut Creek at which U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) and other officials spoke against the war in Iraq. • A Women's International League for Peace and Freedom gathering at a courthouse in Santa Barbara in support of an antiwar protester — a 56-year-old Salinas woman — facing federal trespassing charges. California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office learned of the monitoring activity more than two months ago. On Friday, a spokesman condemned the actions, saying they violated the groups' constitutional right of free speech. "When people exercise their 1st Amendment rights to rally, march and protest, they should not have to worry that intelligence officials are watching them or their activities are in any way being painted with the terrorism brush," Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said in an interview....
Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his caree Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift -- the Navy lawyer who beat the president of the United States in a pivotal Supreme Court battle over trying alleged terrorists -- figures he'll probably have to find a new job. Of course, it's always risky to compare your boss to King George III. Swift made the analogy to the court, saying President Bush had overstepped his authority when he bypassed Congress and set up illegal military tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees such as Swift's alleged al-Qaida client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The justices agreed, ruling 5-3 Thursday in favor of dismantling the current tribunal system. Despite his spectacular success, with the assistance of attorneys from the Seattle firm Perkins Coie, Swift thinks his military career is coming to an end. The 44-year-old Judge Advocate General officer, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country by The National Law Journal, was passed over for promotion last year as the high-profile case was making headlines around the world. "I may be one of the most influential lawyers in America," the Seattle University Law School graduate said, "but I won't be in the military much longer. That irony did strike me." Swift's future in the Navy now rests with another promotion board that is expected to render its decision in the next couple of weeks. Under the military's system, officers need to be promoted at regularly scheduled intervals or their service careers are essentially over....
Airport security slammed in Congress U.S. lawmakers this week called the TSA's baggage screening and bomb detection systems inadequate. The failure rates of some Transportation Security Administration programs indicated the potential for dire consequences, a leading GOP congressman said according to the GovExec.com report. "The system we now have in place, the failure rate (to detect explosives)] is just disastrous," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Detailed information on failure rates was classified, the lawmakers said. In addition, TSA's baggage handlers we injured on the job more often than employees at other federal agencies, Mica said at a hearing. He cited an Occupational Safety and Health Administration report that said 16 percent of TSA baggage screeners were injured at work. Systems that kept luggage out of screeners' hands and on conveyor belts would be faster and safer, Mica said. Some baggage examination machines require too much staffing, as well, he said. Mica also urged the agency to look into a more standard and consistent screening system. "TSA unfortunately created a hodgepodge of systems," he said, calling for an investigation into the agency's screening contracts....
Base intruder caught with guidance system Military police at an Arizona base took 45 minutes to respond to a Tucson police call about an intruder because officers could not find the right key. A $78,000 navigation system for a Navy anti-submarine plane was allegedly later found in the intruder's home, the Arizona Daily Star reports. The incident at the Davis-Monahan Base began June 13 when police spotted a man they later identified as Christopher Howard inside the perimeter fence in an area known as "the boneyard," an aircraft storage area. Because Tucson officers had no power to make an arrest, they held Howard until they were told military police could not get to the area, when they released him with a warning to stay off the base. The FBI later arrested Howard on suspicion of stealing government property, the Daily Star said. Howard claimed to be an aircraft buff who had entered the base in an area where the fence was missing to get a closer look at the planes, the newspaper reported....
Emergency network goes unused First responders are not using the Homeland Security Department's new communication network and instead are relying on the telephone when terrorist situations arise. A report by the department's inspector general released yesterday says very few of the thousands of officials registered to access the network use the secure Web site to share information. Registered users say the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) "does not provide them the situational awareness they need to manage or respond to emergency operations or terrorist-related events," the report said. Federal officials created the HSIN after the September 11 terrorist attacks to share information with law enforcement, emergency management, fire departments, local homeland security officials, the National Guard and counterterrorism officials. The Web site has 10 portals that provide classified information, law-enforcement analysis, and data on international incidents and emergency management. The report says that in December, fewer than 100 of nearly 10,000 registered users of the counterterrorism portal logged on to the site and 40 of more than 4,000 users of the emergency-management portal checked the site. During the London bombings in July, users needed timely information on whether the attacks were suicide bombings so transportation security could be adjusted on local levels. "However, the information provided on HSIN was no more useful or timely than information available via public news sources," the report said....
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror. Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar. Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties. However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks. And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program. It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies. The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user....
Analysis: Wartime Powers Face Scrutiny The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo puts the brakes on what has been a sharp expansion of executive powers and raises fresh questions about other aspects of President Bush's war-on-terror policy. The 5-3 decision was a frontal assault on Bush's tactics and a reaffirmation of the court's own role in a system where power is shared among three branches of government. "What it says is that the court has a viable interest in remaining the ultimate authority on the law," said Charles Rose, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla. Other administration anti-terror programs, including a warrantless eavesdropping program that worries even some Republicans, "are based on the same interpretation of presidential authority in a time of war" rejected in the Guantanamo case, Rose said. Legal and presidential scholars saw the decision as a check on the president's assertion of expanded wartime powers. They likened it to the court's 1952 rejection of President Truman's efforts to take over a strike-closed steel mill by claiming its steel production was necessary to the U.S. war effort in Korea. Similarly, the Supreme Court rejected President Nixon's claim in the early 1970s of broad wartime power to authorize warrantless wiretap surveillance of domestic groups opposed to the Vietnam war, such as the Black Panthers. "The Supreme Court normally does not reverse the president during wartime," said Stephen J. Wayne, a Georgetown University professor and presidential expert. "But this president has claimed a lot of power, much of it under the guise of the state of war that we're in against terrorists. And I think what the Supreme Court is saying is that you've gone too far."....
Court's Ruling Is Likely to Force Negotiations Over Presidential Power The Supreme Court's Guantánamo ruling on Thursday was the most significant setback yet for the Bush administration's contention that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath have justified one of the broadest expansions of presidential power in American history. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their first term bypassing Congress in the service of what they labeled a "different kind of war." Now they will almost certainly plunge into negotiations they previously spurned, over the extent of the president's powers, this time in the midst of a midterm election in which Mr. Bush's wartime strategies and their consequences have emerged as a potent issue. The ruling bolsters those in Congress who for months have been trying to force the White House into a retreat from its claims that Mr. Bush not only has the unilateral authority as commander in chief to determine how suspected terrorists are tried, but also to set the rules for domestic wiretapping, for interrogating prisoners and for pursuing a global fight against terror that many suspect could stretch for as long as the cold war did. What the court's 5-to-3 decision declared, in essence, was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had overreached and must now either use the established rules of courts-martial or go back to Congress — this time with vastly diminished leverage — to win approval for the military commissions that Mr. Bush argues are the best way to keep the nation safe. For Mr. Bush, this is not the first such setback. The court ruled two years ago that the giant prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was not beyond the reach of American courts and that prisoners there had some minimal rights....
THE COURT'S STUNNING HAMDAN DECISION or much of American history, the Supreme Court has refused to resolve the most fundamental conflicts between individual rights and national security. Instead it has required Congress explicitly to authorize any presidential intrusion into the domain of civil liberty--even when national security is threatened. In this way, the Court has enlisted the separation of powers on behalf of individual liberty. The Court's stunning decision in the Hamdan case is a ringing endorsement of this simple practice. In brief, the Court ruled that in the absence of clear congressional permission, or some kind of emergency, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces may not try a suspected terrorist in special military commissions. The Court so ruled without resolving the largest constitutional questions and hence without forbidding Congress and the president, acting together, to use military tribunals as they see fit. The Court's analysis came in three parts. First, the Court said that under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Congress authorized the president to use commissions only in special circumstances. To be sure, the president can use such commissions to determine whether an alleged enemy has violated the law of war. But the particular charges against Hamdan claimed no violation of the law of war. Instead the government alleged only that he "conspired" to violate that law. The problem is that Congress has never identified "conspiracy" as a war crime--and no precedent establishes it as such. In the Court's view, this shortcoming illustrates the broader problem, which is that without specific congressional authorization, the president must establish some kind of "military necessity" for the use of special commissions. There was no such necessity here. After all, Hamdan's tribunal was not appointed by a commander in the battlefield, but by a retired general far from active hostilities. Second, the Court emphasized that Hamdan's trial would not guarantee him the right to be informed of the evidence against him--a right that is guaranteed in court-martial proceedings....
Courts, Congress Resist Growing White House Power As demonstrated by yesterday's landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the legality of military tribunals to try "enemy combatants," the administration of President George W. Bush has consistently sought to expand the power of the presidency in the name of the "global war on terror." The president has claimed he has "inherent rights" under the U.S. Constitution to do "whatever it takes" to protect the U.S. public during times of war – even if that means issuing "signing statements" that have the effect of ignoring or modifying laws passed by Congress, or invoking the so-called state secrets privilege to keep potentially embarrassing cases from getting to court. A "signing statement" is language a president can use to modify or effectively nullify laws passed by Congress. Signing statements have been sparingly used since the early days of the Republic, but President Bush has dramatically increased their use during his six years in office. Invoking the state secrets privilege – claiming that disclosure of sensitive information in a court trial would endanger national security – is another tactic frequently used by the Bush administration to stop potentially embarrassing lawsuits against the government. Many of these suits are brought by government employees who allege fraud, mismanagement, or other unlawful conduct, so the state secrets privilege has successfully been invoked by the government to silence "whistleblowers." But now a member of the president's own Republican Party is pushing back against the administration by introducing a bill to limit what he considers abuse of the state secrets tactic. Christopher Shays, a longtime Republican member of Congress from a heavily Democratic district in Connecticut, believes that the state secrets provision has been used too frequently and with too little public protection. In particular, he is concerned that it will continue to be used to block whistleblower cases. "If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," says Shays, who has long been a proponent of limiting government secrecy....
USA Today: Call Database Not So Broad USA Today acknowledged in a "note to our readers" Friday that it could not establish that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the National Security Agency to provide it with customer calling records, as it previously reported. But spokesman Steve Anderson said "this is an important story that holds up well. At the heart of our report is the fact that NSA is collecting phone call records of millions of Americans." "What we address in the editors' note," he said, "deals with the fact that we originally reported that the telephone companies were working under contract with the NSA. We've concluded that we cannot establish that BellSouth or Verizon entered into a contract with the NSA to provide the bulk calling records." In an accompanying story, the newspaper reported Friday that lawmakers on House and Senate intelligence committees have said that while the NSA has amassed a huge database calling records, cooperation with the NSA by telephone companies was not as extensive USA Today initially reported on May 11....
The Basic Questions The Financial Spying Program, how many people has it caught? Who are they? Where are they? What has been done about them? Did it catch anyone that could not have been caught another way? What was the cost per catch? Would that expenditure in time, effort and money, been better applied elsewhere? Did it catch anyone that was part of 9/11? Al Qaeda spent a lot of money on 9/11. They spent a lot of money elsewhere. How many of the Al Qaeda’s backers has this program found? More than one? Why haven’t they been arrested? Who are they? Where are they? The wiretaps without warrants program, how many people did it catch? How many operations did it interrupt? How many arrests or captures did it lead to? What did it cost? What does it continue to cost?....
DON'T FALL FOR THE BUNKUM OF "EMERGENCY POWERS" In the ancient Roman Republic, the Senate could appoint a temporary dictator, and invest him with specific and often sweeping powers, to deal with extraordinary conditions. And on both sides of the wall behind the Speaker’s desk in the United States House of Representatives are prominently displayed Roman fasces: an ax within a bundle of sticks, symbolizing the plenitude of governmental power—a classical representation of Mao Tse-tung’s epigram that “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The illusions of modern politicians aside, however, that historical allusion does not invest Congress with all the powers of the Roman Senate, let alone a license to arm the President with the authority of an ancient Roman dictator—or of a latter-day Duce. The modern doctrine of “emergency powers” is striking because—unlike the authority of the ancient Roman Senate to appoint a dictator—“emergency powers” lack both a specific source in the Constitution and a definition. Obviously, if the Constitution contained a clause explicitly delegating to Congress “emergency powers,” delineating the content of such powers, and setting out specific conditions under which they could be exercised, by whom, and for what purposes, no one could complain. No such provision exists in the Constitution, however. Today, officeholders simply announce that an “emergency” exists and that they are assuming “emergency powers” to deal with it—with both the erstwhile “emergency” and the “powers” unilaterally defined by them without reference to anything in the Constitution. To any legally literate individual, this situation should be intolerable....