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DHS Warns Of Pregnant Prosthetic Belly Bombings The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are warning against a new type of terrorism carried out by women who appear to be pregnant. It may be the newest wave in suicide attacks: a prosthetic pregnant belly serving as a compartment for explosives. The belly opens up from the front and the explosives are placed inside. "It's not the first time we've had women involved before in one way or another," says security expert Robert Strang. Strang tells CBS 2 he isn't surprised at the new lows terrorists will stoop to -- lows that include those with Down syndrome even carrying out suicide attacks in Baghdad. "They're recruiting anybody they can get to do those things that's not going to inform law enforcement, that's not going to be a threat to these organizations that can get the job done," says Strang. With terrorist training camps up and running in Pakistan, there are now fears Americans might one day be involved. Authorities are increasingly worried that Al Qaeda is actively recruiting people who look like Americans and sound like Americans to carry out the next attack on America....
Migrant-smuggling ring dealt serious blow Authorities say they have crippled a human-smuggling ring that shuttled 24 to 60 illegal immigrants daily to the Phoenix area from the border town Naco in southeastern Arizona. Two Cuban nationals are suspected of running the organization, which law-enforcement officials described as one of the largest and most sophisticated operations in Arizona. They said the ring moved four to six loads of immigrants per day, averaging six to 10 people per load, and grossed as much as $130,000 a week. The two, Jose Luis Suarez-Lemus, 41, and Roel Ayala Fernandez, 35, both Valley residents, are believed to have taken over the syndicate about a year ago, but authorities say the operation has been in existence for at least a decade and may have smuggled tens of thousands of immigrants into the country. Both are in custody. In all, 48 people have been identified in a criminal indictment relating to the seven-month investigation into the organization. Authorities executed search warrants in Phoenix, Peoria and Bisbee. Ten people have been arrested, and others are still at large. A total of 75 suspects have been identified. "Operation River Walkers" began as a money-laundering case of the state Financial Crimes Task Force, which has spent several years investigating smuggling organizations by tracking Western Union money shipments sent to Arizona drophouses for the payment of coyote fees. Phoenix police Lt. Vince Piano said detectives got an intimate look into the syndicate's inner workings, from the $1,000 paid to the border organizer arranging the loads to the $50 for the drophouse cook. Smugglers often charged up to $2,500 per person....
Border locals complain DHS uncompromising Border residents complained to a House panel Thursday that the Homeland Security Department has been unwilling to listen to them as it builds a security fence along the U.S-Mexico border. The complaints stem from the federal government's effort to build 700 miles of fence along the southern border, required by a 2006 law signed by President Bush. The Homeland Security Department wants to finish about 370 miles by the end of the year. But local officials said the department has ignored them and their concerns in its rush to meet that goal. For example, some landowners want the department to leave in place barbed wire fencing that costs $8,000 to $10,000 a mile. The fencing is being ripped out as vehicle barriers are erected along the border, said Nan Stockholm Walden, an Arizona farmer and rancher. "There's been a breakdown in trust," she said. "There seems to be no willingness to compromise or listen at all and that's where people become suspicious and tell DHS they won't let them on their land." The Homeland Security Department has filed dozens of condemnation lawsuits against landowners in Texas, Arizona and California to get access to their property. Recently, Homeland Security agreed to a local plan to improve levees on the Rio Grande near Hidalgo County in response to opposition to plans that would put homes behind the fence. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster asked the panel to "use your muscle to bring them to the table and work with us." "We were told that the (Customs and Border Protection) had held 18 town hall meetings that, on investigation, turned out to be meals in restaurants and phone calls," said Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition of elected officials and business owners....
Dangerous Delay in Background-Checking Legal Immigrants It seems that immigration, legal and illegal, is too numerically overwhelming for the federal government to handle properly. This is an egregious problem, one highlighted earlier this month when President George W. Bush's Administration announced that it will grant permanent residency status to tens of thousands of legal immigrants without first completing their required background checks against the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigative files because the backlog of legal immigration cases is too large and growing rapidly. The change in status will affect an unknown number of applicants whose cases otherwise are complete but whose FBI checks have been pending for more than six months. The backlog has left many legal immigrants in limbo. I applaud these immigrants for following the rules and applying to live here legally. They are not the problem; the federal government is. Part of the problem is that the system of background checks is inefficient. The FBI stores more than 86 million investigative files which electronically complete the background checks for about 90% of legal immigrants within three months. The remaining 10% can take years to finish through paper-based searches for any mention of an applicant's name in records stored in 265 locations across the country. Congress has approved more money to speed the FBI name checks. Unfortunately, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency handling the background checks for permanent residency status, plans to use the increased funding to hire more FBI contractors. What USCIS should do is mount an intensive campaign with the FBI to make all FBI files electronic, so that it will no longer require so much time and manpower to dig through paper files across the country. But such a common-sense idea rarely occurs to bureaucrats....
Real ID Act a real intrusion on rights, privacy If, as proposed in the law, a person must have a Real ID Act-compliant card in order to access a federal building, access any regulated or interstate mode of transportation, or obtain any federal benefit, then we have surrendered to the federal government (that is, federal bureaucrats) the power to deny citizens all manner of activities guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Consider: A person not possessing a Real ID Act-compliant identification card could not enter any federal building, or an office of his or her congressman or senator or the U.S. Capitol. This effectively denies that person their fundamental rights to assembly and to petition the government as guaranteed in the First Amendment. A person seeking to exercise their right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment could henceforth be denied that ability if they do not possess a precious Real ID card, because the federal bureaucracy known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives probably will decree that such a form of identification is necessary to meet federal requirements for purchasing a firearm. Very possibly the Real ID card will be required in order to vote in any election for federal office. A veteran may be denied access to a VA hospital because he or she lacks the requisite Real ID card, perhaps because they did not have the money required to purchase it or because they could not locate the background forms the Department of Homeland Security required to obtain one. A business traveler, unable to afford to travel by private jet, is denied the ability to make a living because their job requires air travel and they do not have a Real ID card — even though they demonstrably pose no danger whatsoever to their fellow travelers....
Baby held in locked room at airport dies A 14-day-old infant traveling here for heart surgery died at Honolulu International Airport on Friday after he, his mother and a nurse were detained by immigration officials in a locked room, a lawyer for the boy's family said. The Honolulu medical examiner's office yesterday identified the infant as Michael Futi of Tafuna, American Samoa's largest village, which is located on the east coast of Tutuila Island. Autopsy findings have been deferred. According to police, the child died at 5:50 a.m. It is unknown why immigration officials detained the mother, the nurse and the child....
Database Will Target Illegal Gun Traffic Several East Coast cities are launching a new tactic against urban gun violence by creating a database to pool information on gun-related crimes and firearms trafficking. The program announced Wednesday will combine data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with material collected by local agencies, including ballistics tests and information gathered in police interrogations. The database, expected to be in operation later this year, will make it more difficult for illegal gun dealers to do business throughout the Interstate 95 corridor, said a group that included 11 mayors and various law enforcement officials from cities including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., and Richmond, Va. "Violent crime, particularly gun crime, is not just a local problem," Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon said. "It's a national problem." New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who co-founded the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition along with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said he thinks the federal government hasn't done enough to curb the use of illegal guns....
Error Gave F.B.I. Unauthorized Access to E-Mail A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode. F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said. Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized. The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect....
FBI warns of revenge attacks by Hezbollah The FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent a bulletin today to state and local law enforcement authorities advising them to watch for potential retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah, one day after the Lebanese militia group vowed to avenge the death of a top commander by attacking Israeli and Jewish targets around the world. "While retaliation in the U.S. homeland is unlikely, Hezbollah has demonstrated a capability to respond outside the Middle East to similar events in the past," according to the "intelligence bulletin" that was sent to about 18,000 state and local law enforcement officials late this afternoon. FBI officials also said they were ramping up their own domestic intelligence-gathering efforts to identify and neutralize any potential Hezbollah threats in the United States in the aftermath of Tuesday's car-bomb assassination of Imad Mugniyah in Syria. On Wednesday, the FBI quietly sent a confidential internal bulletin to its 101 Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country warning of the possible domestic consequences of Mugniyah's killing....
TSA: Taking, Splurging, and Appropriating When the infant agency first started hiring employees, top brass set up their recruiting offices in lavish hotels with golf courses, pools, and spas, such as the Wyndham Peaks Resort in Telluride, Colorado. Then, at a cost of 435 million taxbucks, they created 150 "temporary assessment centers" across the country to vet their new hires. The final cost to the poor dumb slob sucker taxpayer was $39,727 per hireling. Following its second year of existence, the TSA threw itself a massive "we love ourselves" half-million-dollar awards ceremony/banquet at the Grand Hyatt in D.C. Senior executives awarded themselves bonuses averaging $16,000 apiece and passed out $81,000 worth of plaques to pet employees. One received a "lifetime achievement award" for two whole years of service. Meanwhile, many of those $39,727 hirelings who graduated from one of those 435 million dollars' worth of "temporary assessment centers" have gone on to join their senior executives in their criminal careers. Jewelry valued at $8,500 disappeared from one woman's checked luggage. A man's $1,300 flat-screen video monitor was boosted from its carrying case. Another passenger caught a checkpoint screener sneaking bucks from his billfold. Custom-made jewelry checked by rapper Lil' Kim disappeared. Digital cameras, portable DVD players, iPods, and silver-plated cufflinks go missing. According to ABC News, 400 of the first 2,000 screeners hired at New York's three major airports already had criminal records. So that's what taxpayers got for their $39,727 hirelings. By November 2004, the TSA had already paid out $1.5 million in damages to 15,000 passengers who filed theft claims against screeners....