FLE

Texas mayors want wider Rio Grande Texan mayors opposed to a planned border fence with Mexico want to widen and deepen the Rio Grande river instead, and say it will be more effective in keeping out illegal immigrants. The U.S. government aims to build 700 miles of new fencing along the frontier with Mexico to boost security and try to stem the tide of immigration from the south. But the Texas stretch of the fence, which would be built on the Rio Grande's desert flood plain, would cut off some ranchers' access to the river, the main source of fresh water in the arid region. Mayors say it would also damage trade and centuries-old ties with Mexico. Six mayors in mainly Hispanic south Texas on the Mexico border call the fence a wall of shame and have vowed to take the federal government to court to block its construction. They say a wider, deeper waterway along the lower Rio Grande would create a more formidable barrier than a fence that immigrants can cut, climb over and tunnel under....
NY governor dropping immigrant license plan New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is dropping a controversial plan to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants because of overwhelming opposition to the policy, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. Spitzer's plan sparked a national debate over the extension of certain privileges to illegal immigrants and haunted Democratic presidential front-runner New York Sen. Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Clinton's equivocating answer to a question in a debate about whether she supported Spitzer's plan prompted lingering criticism from her closest Democratic rivals, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Republicans also were using it as a new line of attack against their old foe. Spitzer planned to formally announce on Wednesday his decision to abandon the license proposal, The New York Times said....
Ex-FBI Employee's Case Raises New Security Concerns A Lebanese national who fraudulently gained U.S. citizenship through a sham marriage managed to obtain sensitive jobs at both the FBI and CIA, and at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah, according to court documents filed yesterday. U.S. officials say there is no evidence that Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, passed secrets to Hezbollah or to other groups the United States considers terrorist. But Prouty's ability to conceal her past from two of the nation's top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration. "It is hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to attain citizenship and then, based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the U.S. government," said U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy in a statement announcing a plea agreement with Prouty. The case marks yet another serious security breach at the FBI, which has come under repeated criticism for lackluster security procedures after the 2001 arrest of Robert P. Hanssen, a longtime Soviet and Russian spy. In an October report, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the FBI is still vulnerable to espionage because it has not implemented several key security measures after that case, including improvements to its background check system....
Crime Data Underscore Limits Of D.C. Gun Ban's Effectiveness Three decades ago, at the dawn of municipal self-government in the District, the city's first elected mayor and council enacted one of the country's toughest gun-control measures, a ban on handgun ownership that opponents have long said violates the Second Amendment. All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a U.S. Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer? Opponents of the ban, who won a March ruling in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared the law unconstitutional, contend in a legal filing that the District's "31-year experiment with gun prohibition" has been a "complete failure." Meanwhile, D.C. officials, who have asked the Supreme Court to reverse the March decision, say the ban is a legally permissible public-safety measure that has saved lives. But you can measure the violence that did occur, using the bellwether offense of homicide to chart the ebb and flow of crime in the District since the ban was enacted. And the violence here over those years was worse than in most other big cities, many of them in states with far less restrictive gun laws....
Rogue Prosecutors the Rule or the Exception? Last week by a margin of 53-40 A divided Senate narrowly confirmed former federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as the 81st attorney general of the United States. Mukasey, had outraged many lawmakers and human rights groups by repeatedly refusing to classify waterboarding, a simulated-drowning technique, as torture. What was not focused on in the hearings or the senate floor debate was the Senators failure to find out what Judge Mukasey intends to do about rogue prosecutors within the Department of Justice he may lead, and how the damage they cause affects public confidence in the department and its mission. While Judge Mukasey’s answer on water boarding may be important to the future of the country and the War on Terror, of at least equal importance is the whether Judge Mukasey would commit to taking strong disciplinary action against overzealous prosecutors by using all the tools at his disposal, including the Office of Professional Responsibility. In USA v. Stein, Assistant United States Attorney Stanley Okula of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) was one of the lead prosecutors in a case against executives from accounting giant KPMG. In three cases against members of the Tollman family, he prosecuted cases against a wealthy family living in Britain and Canada. In the KPMG case, the government prosecution was found to have violated the defendant’s Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. The judge wrote that the prosecutors “used their life and death power over KPMG to coerce its personnel to bend to the government’s wishes” and described the prosecutors actions as “outrageous and shocking”. In the Tollman cases—Okula has gone after the family in Canada, Britain and the United States—judges have been similarly critical, including a British judge describing Okula’s actions as “reprehensible” and a Canadian judge saying “misconduct of this sort cannot ever be tolerated”. Despite this extraordinarily harsh criticism by three courts in three different countries, the prosecutor endures, ready to once again run roughshod over Constitutional rights in pursuit of his unique and perverted notions of justice....
Bush Approves Clearances for N.S.A. Inquiry Just four days after Michael B. Mukasey was sworn in as attorney general, Justice Department officials said Tuesday that President Bush had reversed course and approved long-denied security clearances for the Justice Department’s ethics office to investigate the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. The department’s inspector general has been investigating the department’s involvement with the N.S.A. program for about a year, but the move suggested both that Mr. Mukasey wanted to remedy what many in Congress saw as an improper decision by the president to block the clearances and that the White House chose to back him. Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, and Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to say whether Mr. Mukasey had pressed Mr. Bush on the clearances for the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Mr. Mukasey himself had indicated in a written answer to senators on Oct. 30, before his confirmation, that the clearance issue had been resolved. But Democrats said they thought Mr. Mukasey deserved credit. In response to appeals from Mr. Hinchey and other members of Congress, the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett, said in February 2006 that he had opened an investigation of the conduct of department lawyers in approving and overseeing the N.S.A. program. But three months later he said the inquiry had been dropped because his staff had been denied the necessary high-level clearances. The Justice Department later said that Alberto R. Gonzales, the attorney general at the time, had recommended that the clearances be granted but that Mr. Bush declined to approve them. Mr. Roehrkasse said the Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation “will focus on whether the D.O.J. attorneys who were involved complied with their ethical obligations of providing competent legal advice to their client and of adhering to their duty of candor to the court.”....