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.

Perry Mason Wannabes To Help Bagram POWs

The administration seems to be prosecuting an overseas contingency operation as if it was an episode of Law & Order or some other fictional legal TV series:

Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to administration officials.

The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration.

International human rights organizations have long criticized conditions at the Bagram facility, where detainees have been held -- many of them for years -- without access to lawyers or even the right to know the reason for their imprisonment. Afghans have cited Bagram, where virtually all prisoners in U.S. custody are held, as a major source of resentment toward coalition forces, a senior administration official said.

[Source: Washington Post]

Did DHS Mess With Texas Border Security?

With the Homeland Security Department's bureaucracy apparently immobilized, the modern day counterparts of Captains Gus McRae and Woodrow F. Call are now on the case:

Special teams of Texas Rangers will be deployed to the Texas-Mexico border to deal with increasing violence because the federal government has failed to address growing problems there, Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday

"It is an expansive effort with the Rangers playing a more high-profile role than they've ever played before," Perry said of the Department of Public Safety's elite investigative unit.

The forces, dubbed "Ranger recon" teams, are the latest effort "to fill the gap that's been left by the federal government's ongoing failure to adequately secure our international border with Mexico," he said.

The governor early this year asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for 1,000 National Guard troops and renewed his call last month in a letter to President Barack Obama. The request is bogged down over who will pay for the troops and how they will be deployed.

ACORN Gets Punked

Investigation journalism still exists, but don't look for it in the mainstream media. While most of the news agencies continues to sleep, two independent filmmakers with a hidden camera have further exposed the brazen, corrupt practices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The entire footage, which led to the firing of the ACORN officials involved, can be found on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com website.

Now comes word that the Census Bureau, who previously said that ACORN was peachy keen, has decided against doing business with ACORN for the 2010 population count.

ACORN is under investigation on the state level in many jurisdictions for voter registration fraud in the 2008 election cycle, but we need a comprehensive (not ceremonial) federal investigation of this so-called community organization by Congress and the U.S. Justice Department. In the meantime, the spigot of taxpayer funding for this crooked enterprise must be turned off immediately.