DHS Plans Cutback in Border Patrol Agents

Given the profound if not overwhelming security challenges at our southern border, how in the world does make sense?

Even though the Border Patrol now reports that almost 1,300 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border is not under effective control, and the Department of Justice says that vast stretches of the border are “easily breached,” and the Government Accountability Office has revealed that three persons “linked to terrorism” and 530 aliens from “special interest countries” were intercepted at Border Patrol checkpoints last year, the administration is nonetheless now planning to decrease the number of Border Patrol agents deployed on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Border Patrol Director of Media Relations Lloyd Easterling confirmed this week...that his agency is planning for a net decrease of 384 agents on the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2010, which begins on October 1.

A Department of Homeland Security annual performance review updated by the Obama administration on May 7 said the Border Patrol “plans to move several hundred Agents from the Southwest Border to the Northern Border to meet the FY 2010 staffing requirements, with only a small increase in new agents for the Southwest Border in the same year.”

[Source: CNSNews.com]

Gitmo Deadline Slips, State Secrets Policy Advances

Other than as a publicity stunt, is there any logical or security based reason why administration wants to shut down the Gitmo prison?

The Washington Post, one of the administration's many house organs, concedes that the January 2010 deadline might have been overly ambitious:

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.

Even before the inauguration, President Obama's top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

Not to worry: As always in these matters, the Bush administration at fault--although, amazingly enough, only partially this time:

Senior administration officials said the central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration.

The administration kind of likes its predecessor's "state secrets" policy, however, although it seems that it wants to have it both ways. From the Washington Times:

Liberals and conservatives alike harshly criticized a new Obama administration policy designed to make it harder for the government to hamper lawsuits against it by invoking a "state secret" claim, and even the support from privacy-rights groups was tepid and cautious.

From one side, civil-liberties advocate and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald called the new policy merely cosmetic and a continuation of "the very Bush/Cheney policies" that President Obama criticized. From the other, Sept. 11 families activist Debra Burlingame said even those changes would encourage jihadist lawsuits and chill counterterrorism operations

Such privacy-advocacy groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center said the new rules looked good, but said the Obama administration still needed to deliver concrete results - by dropping its support for several Bush-era invocations of the privilege in court and by pushing through Congress a permanent law on the matter.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration appeared to vindicate such longstanding liberal criticisms by invoking the state-secret privilege to urge U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to toss a 2004 warrantless-wiretapping lawsuit filed by the Ashland, Ore., branch of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.

Justice Department lawyer Anthony Coppolino made the same arguments at Wednesday's hearing in San Francisco that Bush administration lawyers had: "Foreign intelligence surveillance is so vital to national security that it is important for the government to maintain secrecy," he argued.

Does this sound like the type of word games that Edwin Howard Armstrong warned about?

The new policy, announced Wednesday, gives the attorney general the sole authority to invoke a "state secret" claim, which allows the government to exclude evidence it says will compromise national security. The new rules, which take effect Oct. 1, also set a higher standard to make that claim, saying that revealing the information would need to pose "the risk of significant harm to national security"; the previous standard, set by the Supreme Court, allowed a claim when there was a risk of "reasonable possibility of harm" to national security. 

Schilling Out

As we predicted, former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling has opted out of running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Shoe Bomber: Membership Has Its Privileges

Okay, so we ostracize CIA interrogators and other counter-terrorism officers while granting privileges to convicted terrorists?

Airplane shoe bomber Richard C. Reid no longer faces severe limits on his prison activities or communications after the Obama administration quietly ended years of hard-nosed curbs against the British-born al-Qaeda terrorist.

This summer the Justice Department halted six years of measures that kept Reid from associating or praying with fellow jailed Muslim terrorists, and limited his access to the news media and pen pals.

That move has outraged victims of al-Qaeda and security experts. The recommendation to lift the restrictions was made with input from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, which prosecuted Reid in 2002, federal officials said.

Meanwhile, seven former CIA directors call for a halt on the Justice Department investigation of their former agency:

Arguing that the actions of the Attorney General are essentially putting this country at greater risk of terrorist attack, a bipartisan team of seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote to President Obama today [September 18] urging him to direct Attorney General Eric Holder to close the criminal investigation looking into whether any CIA officers went beyond what they were told was legal in their interrogations during counterterrorism investigations.

Allowing future investigations and prosecutions “will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country,” the seven men write. “In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.”

DHS Put New Border Construction Projects On Hold

DHS Secretary Napolitano, who only gave lip service to border security as governor of Arizona, appears to be in over her head even according to AP:

Facing criticism for her handling of federal stimulus money, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she would not start any new border construction projects while the department reviewed how projects were selected.

Napolitano has faced questions since The Associated Press reported last month that Homeland Security officials did not follow their internal priority lists when choosing which border checkpoints would get money for renovations. Under a process that is secretive and susceptible to political influence, officials planned to spend millions at tiny checkpoints, passing over busier, higher-priority projects.

The criticism peaked Wednesday when a senior Senate Democrat, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, said that, despite Napolitano's assurances, he felt Homeland Security was treating the economic stimulus plan like a "bottomless pit" of taxpayer money. It was unusually pointed criticism from a member of the president's own party about how the administration is handling economic recovery spending.

White House Gathering Social Media Data

There seems to be a pattern emerging with this administration:

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.

"The White House has not been adequately transparent, particularly on how it makes use of new social media techniques, such as this example," he said...

The National Legal and Policy Center, a government ethics watchdog, said archiving the sites would have a "chilling effect" on Web site users who might wish to leave comments critical of the administration.

[Source: Washington Times]

Joint Terrorism Task Force Preempts Bomb Plot

In a "domestic contingency operation," the FBI and NYPD raided at least three Queens, NYC, apartments on the hunt for bomb-making materials:

Federal officials launched a series of raids Monday after tailing a suspected Al Qaeda operative believed to have been orchestrating a bomb plot.

FBI agents thought the threat was significant enough to race to court Sunday night to get an emergency search warrant to look for bomb-making components, explosive powders, gels, TNT and fuses, sources said.

Update:

Federal agents have arrested terror suspect Najibullah Zazi, who had been grilled for days about his knowledge of a bomb plot against New York, a spokeswoman for his attorney said. The 24-year-old suspected al Qaeda bomb-maker was taken into custody along with his father, Mohammed, 53, yesterday [September 19] in Colorado, where he is said to work as an airport shuttle driver. He and his dad were busted in their Aurora, Colo., apartment at about 9:30 p.m., according to the Denver Post. They were later taken to jail and charged with making false statements, the paper said. Zazi is believed by authorities to have been plotting a terror attack and even researched New York Fashion Week venues and sports stadiums, it was revealed yesterday.