Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
Cop Killing Sparks Immigration Debate
The shooting of a Houston police officer has sparked a new battle over immigration.
Juan Leonardo Quintero, an illegal immigrant, has been charged with killing a Houston police officer last week after a routine traffic stop.
Police Chief Harold Hurtt blamed the federal government for failing to secure U.S. borders.
Quintero allegedly shot Officer Rodney Johnson four times in the head while in handcuffs in the back seat of his patrol car.
Johnson arrested Quintero during a routine traffic stop for speeding but apparently missed the suspect's gun in a pat-down search.
Following the shooting, a video showed Houston police officers pulling open the back doors of Johnson's patrol car and yanking the suspect out of the back seat.
"It's very easy to make a mistake. I am not saying a mistake was made," one Houston police officer said. "Unfortunately, we are in the business where a mistake can kill you."
The suspect should not have been in the United States.
Quintero was deported in 2004 after a conviction for indecency with a child.
"The subject was deported, and yet he came back, so if the government fulfilled their responsibility of protecting the border we would probably not be standing here today," Hurtt said.
The Houston Police Department has been struggling this year to deal with the influx of Katrina evacuees and an immigration problem that is only getting worse.
Border Patrol said thousands of illegal immigrants crossed into the United States each month.
Johnson received a commendation for valor for pulling several children from a burning building.
He leaves behind a wife who is also a police officer and their five children.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2487004&page=1
posted by Matthew LeFande 6:00 PM
matt@lefande.com
Armed Citizen of the Week
A 38-year-old woman staying at the Homewood Suites in Wichita Falls, Texas turned the tables Tuesday night on a potential attacker in the parking lot.
She pulled her .380 automatic pistol on the man, who came up behind her as she was getting sinus medicine from her van about 9 p.m.
The man asked her, "Do you have anything good in that van?"
The woman knew she was in trouble. She told him yes and moved to the front passenger-side door.
She pulled out her pistol and heard a knife click open.
When she looked back, she saw the man was holding a knife pointed downward in his hand.
She quickly turned, pointed the gun right at him and asked, "Are you really sure you want to do whatever you're going to do?"
He took off running, the father said.
The woman immediately went back inside the hotel, alerted the staff, and they called police.
Her father said she was calm at the time, going into "auto-pilot" and remembering everything she had learned in the classes she took to get her gun permit, he said.
"Of course, three hours later she was a basket case," he said. "She felt violated and real anxious."
This wasn't the first time the woman had faced a trying situation.
Her father said her fiance was involved in a shootout in Houston, which made her realize she needed to take precautions herself.
"When that happens to somebody close to you, you learn," he said.
So not even a year ago, the West Texas woman decided to get licensed to carry a gun, something her brother had been trying to convince her of because her job requires travel, her father said.
The woman who was accosted is one of more than 150,000 people in Texas licensed to carry firearms.
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/local_news/article/0,1891,TRN_5784_5009550,00.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 10:07 AM
matt@lefande.com
UK Force admits rejecting white men
Gloucestershire police force has admitted illegally rejecting 108 job applicants because they were white men.
The Police Federation said the force has been trying to recruit more female officers and more people from ethnic minorities to meet a government target.
But one of the unsuccessful applicants, Matt Powell took legal action and has been awarded £2,500 by a tribunal.
Mr Powell, 30, said he became suspicious when he was told he had been "randomly deselected".
The case comes six months after Avon and Somerset Police admitted it had illegally rejected almost 200 applications from white men for the same reason.
The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and the Equal Opportunities Commission who led the investigation, said the Gloucestershire force had unlawfully discriminated on the grounds of race and sex.
A spokesman said: "Unlawful racial discrimination is unacceptable and as the guardian of the Race Relations Act we will hold organisations to account if we think that they are in breach of the Act."
Police are under pressure to meet the government target, set in 1999, that by 2009, 7% of police officers in England and Wales should be from ethnic minority groups.
In September 2005, only 1.6% of Gloucestershire Police officers were black or Asian.
Ian Anderson, chairman of Gloucestershire Police Federation blamed unrealistic government targets for their illegal recruitment drive.
"The government set a target of 7% of the force to be from ethnic minorities, when ethnic minorities make up only around 2.8% of the population.
"I think to call it a clumsy policy would be diplomatic.
"It clearly wasn't the way to do it and has caused a great deal of consternation and disquiet in the force and the local community."
Earlier this year, Gloucestershire's Assistant Chief Constable Michael Matthews admitted 'positive action' had been taken to recruit more women and from ethnic minorities.
"It is essential in a democratic policing environment to ensure that under-represented groups are prioritised in our recruitment drives," he said.
Mr Powell's solicitor, Nigel Tillott, said: "The impact of this is that it is now clear how far public authorities can go in positive action.
"What they cannot do is discriminate against white males when it comes to job applications."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/5369876.stm
posted by Matthew LeFande 9:14 AM
matt@lefande.com
Flying the deadly skies
Bogdan Dzakovic's story should alarm anyone who flies. He is a former counter-terrorism expert with the Federal Aviation Administration. His job was to think and act like a terrorist.
Dzakovic was in charge of the FAA's Red Team -- a small, elite squad who conducted mock undercover raids as terrorists and hijackers. It probed vulnerable areas inside airports. With surprising ease and frequency during routine tests, members of his team slipped bombs, guns and knives onto aircraft.
Several days after Sept. 11, 2001, the FAA grounded the Red Team, apparently because it didn't want to be embarrassed by the team's findings. Dzakovic disagreed with this cowardly attempt to bury the truth. And so he took the bold step of filing a whistle-blower disclosure in October 2001 with the Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency. That document -- the first of its kind by an FAA Security Division employee -- set in motion a lengthy and costly investigation by the inspector general.
One finding of that inquiry, according to Dzakovic, was that FAA security operated in a way that created a "substantial and specific danger to public safety."
But instead of rewarding Dzakovic, the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, which had swallowed the FAA, punished him by reassigning him to an entry-level clerical position behind a desk. He spent months punching holes in paper and putting training binders together for new TSA employees. The counter-terrorism expertise of this valuable 14-year FAA veteran was stupidly wasted. He wanted to spend the rest of his career fighting bad guys, but his government bosses thought that wasn't such a good idea after he became a whistle-blower.
On May 22, 2003, Dzakovic was invited to speak before the 9/11 Commission, which conducted an 18-month inquiry into U.S. intelligence failures leading up to Sept. 11.
"The Red Team was extraordinarily successful in killing large numbers of innocent people in these simulated attacks," he told the commissioners. "We breached security up to 90 percent of the time. The FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead, we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities, to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be 'checking.'
"What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system. Our airports are not safer now than before 9/11. The main difference between then and now is that life is now more miserable for passengers."
You won't find Dzakovic's testimony anywhere in what the 9/11 Commission published in July 2004: "Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States." (Only a single footnote on page 441 lists his appearance before the commission.)
Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn't," he told me. "They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. After 9/11, they all scurried into their little rat holes and waited for the firestorm to burn itself out. Then they crawled out and suddenly they are experts in aviation security.
"Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration. I have never in my life been around more gutless, inept and outright ignorant people than I have at TSA headquarters, most of whom are in management. You combine this atmosphere with absolutely no accountability and it is a very dangerous formula for a repeat of 9/11.
"There are so many obvious holes in the system that are not being closed, it is very scary. And what's worse is that they are not being closed for the exact same reasons that they weren't closed leading up to 9/11. It's the perpetuation of the good old boys' club. Rarely do you see a bureaucrat or politician that actively encourages subordinates to give them bad news. Instead, they prefer to be surrounded by people who constantly present a rosy picture. So the only people that get promoted up the chain are the ones who play the game and don't ruffle any feathers."
Meanwhile, Congress and the courts continue to erode whistle-blower rights.
"The TSA does have a team of people doing testing, but as I mentioned in my testimony to the 9/11 Commission, the current team should more properly be called a "Pink" Team because they are not operating to the capabilities of the terrorists. The TSA has not fully appreciated the true value of a Red Team -- which is getting the team to actually think like terrorists so that they can identify vulnerable areas in security."
One of his major beefs is that "the FAA used to say, leading up to 9/11, that 'we must be doing something right because there has not been a terrorist attack against the U.S. aviation industry since Pan Am 103.' Well, the fact of the matter is the terrorists operate on their schedule, not on our concept of how they should operate.
"The bad guys are smart enough to test the system. In fact, U.S. troops found Arabic language translations of General Accounting Office documents, describing how bad aviation security was, in some of the Afghanistan caves used by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The terrorists do a very thorough job before they undertake an operation.
"But one thing the FAA itself acknowledged pre-9/11 was that the favorite weapon of terrorists, when they weren't using a grenade or a bomb or a gun, was a knife of less than four inches in length. And these knives were specifically allowed to be carried on board by FAA regulations even though they knew it was their favorite weapon. Because the 9/11 terrorists studied the system, they did not break any FAA regulation. They carried (box-cutters) less than four inches in length."
Here's why Dzakovic believes the nature of aviation security invites an attack: "Aviation security must first and foremost 'process' people and their luggage as rapidly as possible, while providing at least some illusion that effective screening is actually taking place. The FAA did a great job of maintaining this fiction, and the TSA is doing the same with billions of dollars of our tax money.
"For example, the one thing we determined on the Red Team was that in order for the CTX bomb-detection machines to be used effectively, you need to have the absolute minimum number of bags going through them because the machines aren't reliable for mass searching of bags. It has to be limited as much as possible to the most suspect people.
"All it takes to bypass these so-called layers of security is a little research from open sources. You can easily find the technical specs of bomb-detecting machines; many are published online by the manufacturers. With a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and electronics, which the bad guys have proven they have, you can figure out how to beat every single one of these systems. The next step, as the 9/11 terrorists demonstrated, is to do some basic surveillance of the system just to see how things operate and get familiar with the airport environment. When (former Red Team member) Steve Elson and Fox News were doing their own undercover sting story at Logan Airport in the spring of 2001, the hijackers were doing their own dry runs at the same time and at the same airport.
"The real problem is that the TSA is built on the same weak foundation as the FAA. It will always be at least one step behind the terrorists. Remember the shoe bomber? Right after that incident, the TSA made everyone take off their shoes at the screening checkpoints. Then we had the female Chechen terrorists who apparently hid explosives in their underwear. And so TSA screeners started groping female passengers until a big public outcry brought that silliness to a stop. Next time the terrorists might put explosives in toothpaste tubes, and you can count on TSA screeners squishing out all the toothpaste from passengers' bags.
"Moreover, there are many objects you can bring on an airplane, or find on one, and use as a weapon. Things like a bottle of wine, a metal flashlight, nonmetallic knives, a carabiner -- a metal clip used by rock climbers that makes great brass knuckles -- or a leather belt with a big metal buckle. The point of all this is that there is an infinite number of ways to smuggle weapons onto an airplane.
"From my Red Team testing days," he said, "the only thing that ever really had me concerned about getting caught trying to sneak a weapon on board was a human being doing profiling. "It's looking at very small anomalies and behavior like nervousness or how someone answers questions. You don't simply ask a passenger 'yes' or 'no' questions. The journalist Paul Sperry said that Islamic suicide terrorists will coat themselves with lilac as some kind of blessing it has for the next life when he's supposed to meet his seventy-two virgins. A profiler should be looking for those subtle signs.
"Another thing I learned from my research was that in every hijacking, passengers or flight crews recognized something hinky about the hijackers before the hijacking began, and this was either on the plane, on the ground before the plane took off, or when the passengers were still in the terminal building. Every single time the hijackers gave off these signs."
"If I were a terrorist mastermind plotting another big attack," he theorized, "and I could muster up another 20 guys, I'd scatter them around to different airports around the country. I would give each one of them three bombs and three different sets of luggage. Some of those bombs will make it onto flights."
A bone-chilling prophecy? Absolutely. Then why isn't the TSA, Homeland Security or Congress listening to experts like Dzakovic and acting on their advice and warnings? The answer is simple. It's easier to silence and thwart dissent within their ranks than to fix systemic problems, which are the cumulative result of years of bureaucratic inertia, lack of accountability, special-interest lobbying and turf wars.
Don't rock the boat might work for many in D.C. But that mind-set, to use a more fitting metaphor, just doesn't fly when it comes to the safety of millions of American passengers who each day nervously prepare for departure.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/INGIVJPJR91.DTL
posted by Matthew LeFande 8:57 AM
matt@lefande.com
Driver Leads Police On Chase, Stops For Red Lights
A Nashua, N.H., man was arrested early Friday morning after police said he led them on a chase through three towns but stopped at every red light.
Joshua Grant, 24, was charged with drunken driving and other violations. Police said the chase began after an officer patrolling Route 102 in Hudson at about 12:30 a.m. passed a car speeding in the opposite direction.
"He noticed a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed," Capt. Jason Lavoie said. "He then turned around, and as he was watching the vehicle, he observed it start to weave within its lane, crossing the double yellow line as well as some of the white lines."
The Hudson officer turned on his lights and ordered the car to pull over, but police said Grant refused to stop. Officers used a spike strip to flatten one of the tires, but they said the car continued going.
"It didn't stop the vehicle, and it continued into Nashua," Lavoie said. "However, the driver would stop as it came up to red lights as it came into Nashua. And they were able to subsequently box in the vehicle so it would no longer go when it came to another stop at one of the red lights."
Police said that although Grant was speeding, driving drunk and refusing to pull over, he did stop for three red lights.
"It's very unusual, yes," Lavoie said. "But it was able to help us out to get the vehicle stopped."
Grant was scheduled to be arraigned later this month.
http://www.wmur.com/news/9809292/detail.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 8:01 PM
matt@lefande.com
Armed Citizen of the Week
Margaret Johnson might have looked like an easy target.
But when a mugger tried to grab a chain off her neck Friday, the 56-year-old Johnson, while riding in her wheelchair, pulled out her licensed .357 pistol and shot him, police said.
Johnson said she was in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood on her way to a shooting range when the man, identified by police as 45-year-old Deron Johnson, came up from behind and went for the chain.
"There's not much to it," she said in a brief interview. "Somebody tried to mug me, and I shot him."
Deron Johnson was taken to Harlem Hospital with a single bullet wound in the elbow, police said. He faces a robbery charge, said Lt. John Grimpel, a police spokesman.
Margaret Johnson, who lives in Harlem, has a permit for the weapon and does not face charges, Grimpel said. She also was taken to the hospital with minor injuries and later released.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/09/wheelchair.shooter.ap/index.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 5:31 PM
matt@lefande.com
