FLE

Chief of staff of US attorney general quits The chief of staff to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned amid intense scrutiny of the Justice Department accused of excessive use of tough anti-terror laws and being overtly political. Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson has resigned his position as chief of staff to the attorney general from Monday, March 12, the department said. "Kyle Sampson has served as a key member of my team beginning at the White House and continuing here at the Department of Justice first as my Deputy Chief of Staff and then as my Chief of Staff," Gonzales said in a statement. The United States has been rocked by a series of revelations that officials overstepped their authority in applying tough anti-terror laws brought in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks....
Key Democrat calls for Gonzales to resign US Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has so politicized the Justice Department that he should step down for the good of the nation, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat said yesterday. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York called for the resignation in light of recent disclosures about the FBI's improper use of administrative subpoenas to obtain private records and the controversy over the firing of eight US attorneys in December. Schumer, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, charged that under Gonzales, the Justice Department has become even more politicized than it was under President Bush's first attorney general, John D. Ashcroft. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, stopped short of suggesting that Gonzales step down. But he said that a report released Friday by the Justice Department's inspector general raised questions about the investigatory powers given to federal agents under the USA Patriot Act, which Congress reauthorized last year....
Gonzales, Mueller admit FBI broke law The nation's top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left open the possibility of pursuing criminal charges against FBI agents or lawyers who improperly used the USA Patriot Act in pursuit of suspected terrorists and spies. The FBI's transgressions were spelled out in a damning 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He found that agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances. The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval. "People have to believe in what we say," Gonzales said. "And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it's frustrating."....
Bush Pledges to End FBI Privacy Lapses President Bush on Saturday pledged an end to FBI lapses that led to illegal prying into people's lives. "Those problems will be addressed as quickly as possible," Bush said during a news conference in Uruguay, the second stop on his Latin America trip. A new audit by the Justice Department's internal watchdog found that the FBI improperly used a tool called national security letters. The letters are administrative subpoenas that don't require judicial approval. Agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records. Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame in most cases, the audit found. "My question is, `What are you going to do solve the problem and how fast can you get it solved?'" said Bush, who was briefed on the report last week....
Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls. You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it. By all accounts, that's what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew in August 2004. And it happened at a time when no one outside a small group of high-ranking officials and workaday spooks knew the National Security Agency was listening in on Americans' phone calls without warrants. Belew didn't know what to make of the episode. But now, thanks to that government gaffe, he and a colleague have the distinction of being the only Americans who can prove they were specifically eavesdropped upon by the NSA's surveillance program. The pair are seeking $1 million each in a closely watched lawsuit against the government, which experts say represents the greatest chance, among over 50 different lawsuits, of convincing a key judge to declare the program illegal. The lawsuit is poised to blow a hole through a bizarre catch-22 that has dogged other legal efforts to challenge the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance. Since the 2005 Times story, and subsequent acknowledgment of the surveillance by the Bush administration, some 50-odd lawsuits have sprung up around the NSA program, taking on the government and various telecom companies who are allegedly cooperating in spying on their customers, including BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint. Justice Department and phone company lawyers have asserted that the plaintiffs in those cases don't have legal standing to sue, because they have no proof that they were direct victims of the eavesdropping. At the same time, the government claims it doesn't have to reveal if any individual was or was not wiretapped because the "state secrets privilege" permits it to withhold information that would endanger national security. The tangible document makes Belew's case uniquely positioned to cut through that thicket, says Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights....
Feds, AT&T urge against wiretap trial The federal government is urging an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, warning that disclosure of such activities could compromise national security. "The suit's very subject matter — including the relationship, if any, between AT&T and the government in connection with the secret intelligence activities alleged by plaintiffs — is a state secret," the Justice Department argued in court papers. The documents were filed late Friday and released Monday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought the suit. It accuses AT&T Inc. of illegally making communications on its networks available to the National Security Agency without warrants, and challenges Bush's assertion that he could use his wartime powers to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant. The NSA had conducted the surveillance without a court warrant until January, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began overseeing the program. The court filings on Friday are part of the government's appeal of U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision last year to keep the foundation's lawsuit alive. Walker ruled that warrantless eavesdropping has been so widely reported that there appears to be no danger of spilling secrets....
D.C. gun ban goes down In a blockbuster opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman, joined by Judge Thomas B. Griffith, ruled that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.” That puts the D.C. Circuit in rather exclusive company. Only the Fifth Circuit, which includes Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has adopted the “individual rights” position; all the other circuits have held that private citizens have no Second Amendment recourse when they challenge state and local gun-control ordinances. Moreover, only the D.C. Circuit has actually invoked the Second Amendment to overturn a government gun regulation. Not even the Fifth Circuit went that far. The case is Parker v. District of Columbia, and the regulation challenged is a 1976 law banning all handgun registrations, barring pistols already registered from being carried from room to room in the home without a license (which is never granted), and requiring all firearms in the home, including rifles and shotguns, to be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. According to the appellate court, activities protected by the Amendment “are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.” In other words, the Constitution forecloses an outright ban on handguns. Ergo, if we Americans decide that a ban is required for public safety, we must change the Constitution....
Gun Owners Irked By Newspaper Database Ploy Virginia handgun owners are fired up over the publication of their names and addresses in a database posted online by a state newspaper. The database of every Virginia resident who holds a state-issued permit to carry a concealed handgun was posted on the Roanoke Times' website Sunday to accompany a column in the paper by Times editorial writer Christian Trejbal. "There are good reasons the records are open to public scrutiny," Trejbal wrote. "People might like to know if their neighbors carry. Parents might like to know if a member of the car pool has a pistol in the glove box. Employees might like to know if employers are bringing weapons to the office." However, gun owners contend such public scrutiny could pose a risk to gun owners and non-gun owners across the state. "I've talked to federal agents who have testified against criminals, and police who have permits, that now have their home address posted on the Internet," Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, told Cybercast News Service. "What if a stalker wants to cross check if his victim has a permit?" Van Cleave said the VCDL is organizing a boycott of the newspaper and businesses that advertise in the paper....
Americans Selling ID Papers to Illegal Immigrants Asked by a federal judge why she sold her birth certificate, Rosie Medellin said she needed a few bucks and did not really think it through. Bobby Joe Flores said he sold his ID documents to buy drugs. Margarita Moya and her son did it to raise money for medicine for a loved one. Their documents were destined for illegal immigrants. In all, seven defendants pleaded guilty in Corpus Christi this past week to charges of selling their birth certificates and Social Security cards for $100 each. Seven other defendants pleaded guilty to buying or reselling those documents as part of a ring that sold documents to illegal immigrants seeking jobs in Dodge City, Kan. The federal government's attention has been on stolen or fabricated identity documents, and officials say they know little about people who sell their own legitimate documents. Defense attorneys said prosecution for selling an ID may be something new. "I've been practicing criminal law for years and this is the first I've seen in our Southern District," said Grant Jones, who represents a roofer with sporadic employment. "If they've [the government] been aware in the past, they've now decided to enforce the law." However, Jones said his client told him that document selling was a well-known way to earn a quick buck....
Bush in a quandary over border agents' case For weeks, defenders of the two former Border Patrol agents imprisoned for shooting a Mexican drug trafficker have bombarded the White House with calls, e-mails and petitions. Their demand is straightforward: A presidential pardon for a pair of Texans they view as heroes persecuted for doing their jobs. "This is a terrible injustice, and I urge you to use your considerable authority and power to pardon these two agents and right this obvious wrong!" reads a petition from Grassfire.org, a conservative Web site that claims more than 337,000 people have signed the online form. But the issue is far from simple for President Bush, who is being asked to wade into a highly controversial case where even the most basic facts are in dispute. The quandary for the president: Whether to side with former Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos or with the prosecutors who contend they were rogue officers who wounded a fleeing, unarmed man and then concealed evidence....
House May Proceed With Hearings on Border Agent Case Lawmakers may hold hearings on the controversial prosecution of two former Border Patrol agents who shot a Mexican suspected of smuggling drugs into the United States. They want to determine whether the Mexican government played a role in the affair. Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), chairman of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, granted a request to hold hearings "to explore possible foreign influence in the ruthless prosecution of ... Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean," according to ranking member Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who made the request. Rohrabacher, who has criticized President Bush harshly over the Ramos-Compean case, praised Delahunt for being willing to pursue the matter. "This hearing will permit us to conduct an official investigation into aspects of the Ramos and Compean prosecution and others cases where a pattern of questionable foreign influence seems to exist," he said in a statement Tuesday. "I hope this Administration will more forthright and cooperative than they have been thus far considering all of our requests for information will now be a part of an official subcommittee investigation, culminating with hearings," Rohrabacher added....
"It's Our Job to Stop That Dream" Border Patrol Agent Elizier Vasquez gets out of his car on Elephants Head Road, a smear of dirt and gravel wedged between two slices of desert. His eyes comb the rust-colored Arizona dirt that stretches for miles to the north, south, and west, its stark beauty marred by scattered piles of trash. A few miles to the east of us is Highway I-19, which shoots straight from Nogales to Tucson, and past that there's more desert. We came here from the U.S.-Mexico border, about 25 miles to the south. The drive took less than 30 minutes. Walking, Vasquez tells me, would have taken about three days. "Look at all the trash left by illegal aliens," he says, navigating through a knee-high pile of old clothes. I trip on a dusty sweatshirt; it catches in the branch of a mesquite tree and rips, brittle and weathered. Empty water jugs lie beneath the desert shrubs, the plastic brittle and broken from the heat. We navigate through backpacks, clothes, empty tuna cans. Shoes, some with soles worn out, lie in piles among the tangles of cactus and mesquite. "We call these lay-up spots," Vasquez says in a low voice. "Illegal aliens rest here while they wait for their rides. Most are known spots. Probably we'll find the illegals sleeping under a tree. If not, they've probably already been picked up by their smugglers."....