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U.S. border cop charged with murdering Mexican A U.S. Border Patrol agent must stand trial for murder in the shooting of a Mexican man trying to enter the United States, an Arizona judge ruled Monday in a case that drew criticism from Mexico. Agent Nicholas Corbett was charged in April with four counts of homicide in the January 12 shooting of Francisco Dominguez Rivera shortly after he crossed the border illegally on a stretch of desert between Douglas and Naco. Cochise County Justice of the Peace David Morales ruled the evidence supported lesser charges of second-degree murder, but threw out charges of first-degree murder, which supposes premeditation. The ruling followed a preliminary hearing that heard evidence from three illegal immigrants present at the shooting, a pathologist, county sheriff's detectives and two Border Patrol supervisors. No date was set for Corbett's arraignment. Following the killing, Mexico's Foreign Ministry complained of "disproportionate violence" and instructed the Mexican Embassy in Washington to investigate the circumstances. Last year, border police captured 1.1 million undocumented immigrants crossing over the border from Mexico and recorded a soaring number of attacks on agents. Lawyers for Corbett argue he shot Dominguez Rivera in self-defense after he was threatened with a rock....
Smuggler's Partner Pleads Guilty in Border Agents Case The owner of a "stash" house who allegedly worked with a Mexican drug smuggler shot by Border Patrol agents has struck a deal with federal prosecutors. Cipriano Ortiz-Hernandez pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana. Cybercast News Service reported last month that Ortiz-Hernandez owned the stash house where Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila of Mexico made drug shipments in October 2005. Ortiz-Hernandez' plea agreement comes after members of Congress criticized a federal prosecutor for granting a "humanitarian" pass for Aldrete-Davila to enter and exit the United States unescorted. Aldrete Davila, already given immunity for one drug charge, reportedly smuggled more marijuana into the country to be stored at the home of Cipriano Ortiz-Hernandez. Terms of Ortiz-Hernandez' plea agreement are sealed. The sentencing hearing is set for Nov. 2....
Same Agencies to Run, Oversee Surveillance Program The Bush administration plans to leave oversight of its expanded foreign eavesdropping program to the same government officials who supervise the surveillance activities and to the intelligence personnel who carry them out, senior government officials said yesterday. The law, which permits intercepting Americans' calls and e-mails without a warrant if the communications involve overseas transmission, gives Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales responsibility for creating the broad procedures determining whose telephone calls and e-mails are collected. It also gives McConnell and Gonzales the role of assessing compliance with those procedures. The law, signed Sunday by President Bush after being pushed through the Senate and House over the weekend, does not contain provisions for outside oversight -- unlike an earlier House measure that called for audits every 60 days by the Justice Department's inspector general. In a conference call with reporters yesterday, officials familiar with the program said they had not worked out all the details of internal oversight, noting that the law was only a day old. But the officials, who spoke to reporters on the condition that they not be identified, said surveillance activities would require a sworn certificate and affidavit, which would be reviewed for accuracy by inspectors general from the Justice Department or intelligence agencies....
FISA Expansion Sparks Civil Liberties Concerns Both chambers of Congress over the weekend voted to expand the government's ability to listen in on foreign conversations as part of the war on terror. But some civil liberties advocates question whether the bill goes too far in broadening the government's warrant-less surveillance power. Despite the congressional support, civil liberties advocates have raised concerns that the measure goes too far in permitting the executive branch to listen in on conversations without adequate judicial oversight. "The administration approach would allow the NSA [National Security Agency] warrant-less access to virtually all international communications of Americans with anyone outside the U.S., so long as the government declared that the surveillance was directed at anyone reasonably believed to be overseas," stated the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS). The CNSS states that the new law "would allow massive surveillance of Americans with no meaningful judicial oversight or individualized probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment." The organization warns that the expanded surveillance powers go beyond the surveillance used in Bush's "terrorist surveillance program." In that program, which also sidestepped FISA court approval, the administration listened in on foreign conversations with suspected terrorists. "For all these millions of American communications, there would be no requirement that the American even be suspected of any contact with or connection to al Qaeda or any other terrorists," CNSS stated. "[T]he purpose of the surveillance that would be authorized under the bill is to gather 'foreign intelligence' generally, not just intelligence about terrorism," it added. Technology and civil liberties scholar Timothy Lee, with the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote: "The only real bright spot is that the legislation sunsets after six months. That will give Congress the opportunity to do what it should have done this weekend: require that no surveillance of domestic communications occur without prior judicial approval of each surveillance target."....
Airlines Sue FBI, CIA Over Sept. 11 Airlines and aviation-related companies sued the CIA and the FBI on Tuesday, asking a federal court to let them interview investigators who can tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or whether it had acted reasonably. The separate lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Manhattan asked a judge to order the government to let the aviation companies gather the information as part of their defense against lawsuits brought by victims or families of victims of the 2001 attacks. In the CIA lawsuit, companies including American Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc., US Airways Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. and The Boeing Co. asked to interview the deputy chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit in 2001 and an FBI special agent assigned to the unit at that time. In the FBI lawsuit, the companies asked to interview a 'limited number of former and current FBI employees' who had participated in investigations of al-Qaida and al-Qaida operatives before and after Sept. 11, 2001....
Judge Orders Release of Reports on ’04 Surveillance A federal judge yesterday rejected New York City’s efforts to prevent the release of nearly 2,000 pages of raw intelligence reports and other documents detailing the Police Department’s covert surveillance of protest groups and individual activists before the Republican National Convention in 2004. In a 20-page ruling, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV ordered the disclosure of hundreds of field intelligence reports by undercover investigators who infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups in a huge operation that the police said was needed to head off violence and disruptions at the convention. But at the behest of the city and with the concurrence of civil liberties lawyers representing plaintiffs swept up in mass arrests during the convention, the judge agreed to the deletion of sensitive information in the documents to protect the identities of undercover officers and confidential informants and to safeguard police investigative methods and the privacy of individuals caught up in investigations. The city had largely based its bid for nondisclosure on the need to protect those identities and methods, and argued that the public might misinterpret the documents or the news media sensationalize them. But the civil liberties lawyers insisted that the documents — even without the sensitive materials — were needed to show in court that the police had overstepped legal boundaries in arresting, detaining and fingerprinting hundreds of people instead of handing out summonses for minor offenses....