By LARRY McSHANE

NEW YORK - The city where a terrorist attack destroyed the World Trade Center towers has again been stiffed in the distribution of federal anti-terrorism funding, members of the state’s congressional delegation complained Saturday.

The numbers are not official yet, but Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Peter King said the city is scheduled to receive about $134 million from an urban security grant program - an increase of about 8 percent from last year but still $73 million less than the city received two years ago.

“Why do they persist in giving money to places that need it a lot less than New York City?” said Schumer, a Democrat. “It’s a disgrace. It’s confounding. … It’s once again unfair to New York. Our needs are different than any other city.”

Last year, New Yorkers complained long and loudly after the Department of Homeland Security slashed anti-terrorism funding for the city by $83 million. The nation’s largest city lost 40 percent of its funding just five years after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, while federal money was increased in such places as Louisville, Ky., and Omaha, Neb.

“They still just don’t get it,” said King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. “New York is by far the No. 1 terrorist target in the country, and no one else is even a close second. That’s the reality. I’m disappointed and angry.”

Word of the $10 million increase over last year was particularly painful since it came around the same time as terrorist activity in Britain, which led New York City officials to heighten security, Schumer said.

Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment, saying it was unclear when the anti-terrorism grants would be officially announced.

Both Schumer and King expressed hopes - and doubts - that the funding would be increased before the announcement.

“I doubt it, but hope springs eternal,” King said. “We need to keep the pressure on.”

My guess is they leaked the information intentionally only to deny it….but in the meantime they plant that seed of fear in the American people, while all along having their talking heads (Lieberman) telling us that only the Republicans can save us from the terrorists. Oh, and supposedly the U.S. had intel about the airport incident two weeks prior to it happened, but oddly enough, the Brits never heard anything about it from the U.S. 17 more months of this crap……….

By John O’Callaghan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Monday played down a report al Qaeda was planning a big attack on the United States, saying there was no credible information about an imminent threat.

As British police investigated two failed car bombs in London and a fiery attack on Glasgow’s airport by a fuel-filled vehicle, U.S. officials tightened security at transport hubs without raising the country’s overall alert level.

“We do not currently have any specific threat information that is credible about a particular attack on the United States,” Chertoff told Fox News.

ABC News, quoting a senior U.S. official, said on Sunday a secret law enforcement report prepared for the Department of Homeland Security warned that al Qaeda planned to carry out a “spectacular” attack this summer.

More at Reuters

By ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Three people were arrested and another was being sought Saturday for allegedly plotting to blow up a fuel line that feeds John F. Kennedy International Airport and runs through residential neighborhoods, authorities said.

The plot never got past the planning stages. It posed no threat to air safety or the public, the
FBI said Saturday.

At a news conference, U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf called it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.”

“The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” she said.

Authorities arrested Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and former JFK employee. He was in custody in Brooklyn and was expected to be arraigned Saturday afternoon.

Two other men, Abdul Kadir of Guyana and Kareem Ibrahim of Trinidad, are in custody in Trinidad. A fourth man, Abdel Nur of Guyana, was still being sought.

All four have been charged with conspiring to attack the airport, one of the nation’s busiest, by blowing up major fuel supply tanks and the pipeline, according to the indictment.

The pipeline takes fuel from a facility in Linden, N.J., to the airport. Other lines service LaGuardia Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport.

Kadir, a Muslim and former member of Parliament in Guyana, was arrested in Trinidad for attempting to secure money for “terrorist operations,” according to a Guyanese police commander who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Kadir left his position in Parliament last year. Muslims make up about 9 percent of the former Dutch and British colony’s 770,000 population, mostly from the Sunni sect.

An official said the plotters had conducted surveillance on giant jet fuel tanks at JFK and the pipeline. They had taken surveillance video of the targets and took it to Trinidad to review the tape, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the arrests were not yet announced.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Three people were arrested and one other was being sought Saturday in connection to a plan to set off explosives in a fuel line that feeds John F. Kennedy International Airport and runs through residential neighborhoods, officials close to the investigation said.

The plot, which never got past the planning stages, did not involve airplanes or passenger terminals, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the arrests had not yet been announced.

The plot posed no threat to air safety or the public, the FBI said Saturday.

Details were to be given out at a 1 p.m. news conference.

The pipeline takes fuel from a facility in Linden, N.J., to the airport. Other lines service LaGuardia Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport.

A third law enforcement official said the suspects include a Guyanese man who used to work at the airport and was arrested in New York City on Friday night. Two other suspects were apprehended in Trinidad.

Investigators were seeking a fourth suspect in Trinidad.

The official said the plotters had conducted surveillance on giant jet fuel tanks at JFK and the pipeline. They had taken surveillance video of the targets and took it to Trinidad to review the tape, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the arrests were not yet announced.

The official said investigators first found out about the plot in January 2006. After that, an informant infiltrated the group.

more at YAHOO! NEWS

Who’s to say ANYBODY who wanted to couldn’t enter the country the same way?

NAPLES, Fla. - (KRT) - Cuban migrant smugglers, who for years have brought people from the island to remote spots in the Keys, have adopted a new strategy to get around the heavily patrolled waters off the Keys:
Launch their smuggling missions from Collier County in Southwest Florida.
The cat-and-mouse shift has everyone, including the Coast Guard and Collier
County sheriff’s deputies, trying to keep up.
”Criminals look to take advantage of vulnerabilities,” said Lt. Tony
Russell, spokesman for the Coast Guard in Miami. “We are working hard to minimize those. The Florida Straits covers from Cay Sal in the east, to the
Marquesas in the west. That’s 25,000 square miles of ocean.”
The increase in smuggling from Collier has been accompanied by another
tactic: dropping off the Cuban migrants in the remote Dry Tortugas and
Marquesas Islands well off Key West, rather than the Keys mainland. Both are
closer to Cuba and harder to patrol. Collier County, with hundreds of miles of coastline and little full-time presence by agencies like the Coast Guard, Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is ideal for smugglers hoping to make an unobtrusive departure and a quick return. The downside: The round trip to Cuba is
longer, so many must rendezvous with refueling boats at sea.
Federal and local law enforcement officials say the smugglers trailer their
boats from South Florida across Alligator Alley to boat ramps that dot the
Southwest Florida coastline, from Everglades City to Fort Myers in Lee
County. From there, they make the trip to Cuba, drop the migrants off in the
remote islands off the Keys, then return to the Southwest Florida ramps and
trailer the boats to Miami.

More here

How the zero-tolerance policies of “America’s Mayor” set us up for the Patriot Act and Guantanamo.

from Mother Jones Magazine
By JoAnn Wypijewski

In Miami last fall, amid news that corrupt housing authorities and developers had deprived thousands of poor people of promised homes, Ivan Martinez began projecting immense images against the walls of the luxury towers that have sprouted with wanton ambition in the footprint of demolished low-income housing. No one commissioned these images; Martinez is a guerrilla artist, an outlaw. As governments across America have imposed increasingly harsh penalties against postering, graffiti, and their requisite tools (New York has made graffiti-writing a felony in some instances, as has Ohio, convicting a man for spraying “Troops Out Now” on a highway overpass; Richmond, Virginia, threatens its citizens from the backs of buses, “Use a spray can, go to jail”), wall’size projections have developed as a fleet-footed alternative. One of Martinez’s ephemera featured a running silhouette crying, “Gentrification!!!!” Another showed a man saying, “I love downtown’s revitalization, but where are the poor people?” One night as Martinez and two friends were projecting from a moving car, police pulled them over and pointed guns at their heads. He hasn’t done a projection since.

Martinez broke no window, destroyed no property. Except through the play of evanescent light, he didn’t even “aesthetically alter” property, as some graffiti artists describe their work. No reasonable person would call him a vandal, one of those punks who elicit curses for their indecipherable scrawl. Like them, though, he made an unsanctioned claim on public space, which was enough to get a gun to his head, and shut him up.

Among a thousand political lies, one of the most durable, and lulling, is the assertion, central to a “quality of life” or “broken windows” theory of policing, that graffiti is the first link in a criminal chain that ends in murder. Hammer petty flouting of the law, the theory holds, and violent crime will decline. New York was the pioneer in this. Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins cracked down on graffiti writers in the 1980s and early ’90s, but it was Rudolph Giuliani who redefined quality of life in terms of a theory and practice of brute force that has since been adopted by city administrations and police departments across the land. Now the graffiti-murder continuum is widely accepted as fact. New York is officially the safest big city in the country unless one is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of 50 shots, or 41, or a toilet plunger, from the police. It is also a strangely passive city, its political atmosphere inert. Like the midnight wheat-paster, whose posters about displacement or aids death distinguished the urban vista until the early ’90s, the dissenting slogan, the broadsheet alert to action from corner mailboxes, has largely vanished. Giuliani is running for president, and no handicapper counts his easy sacrifice of liberty to security as a political liability. He compares President Bush’s escalation of the war in Iraq to his own big-fist approach to New York, and suffers no harm for the implication of that admission: that he pursued a war on part of the city’s population while the rest of us became inured to punishment, to brakes on free expression and policing as a way of life.

read more at MOTHER JONES

Crossposted from Global Research:

The US government and Washington elites are aggressively ramping up their “war on terrorism” rhetoric and propaganda, stoking fear and paranoia in order to bolster their war agenda, and reinvigorate the mass public perception of new and growing “homegrown terrorism” threats to the US homeland.

The next phase of America’s war abroad (under the management of a post-Bush neocon/neoliberal consensus), and the deepening militarization of the US homeland towards a full police state, are well underway.

Who or what was behind the Fort Dix Six?

On May 8, 2007, six foreign-born Muslims were arrested during an attempt to purchase assault weapons, and accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix (New Jersey), as well as an assault on a Pennsylvania Navy installation.

While evidence regarding this case continues to unfold, what is clear is that the FBI and US intelligence had been infiltrated and monitored over an extensive period, as early as January 2006. An unnamed “shadowy informer“, likely an intelligence asset, is the key figure behind this operation and the arrest.

An objective analysis of the Fort Dix incident leads to questions about US military-intelligence involvement, and the use of the incident as a pretext:

“There is no doubt that the actions of the US military around the world are provoking a level of disgust and anger that could well produce misguided terrorist attacks within the US itself. Nonetheless, the various terrorist A-plots- exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur.”

In each of these cases, the supposed conspiracy has been heavily publicized in a transparent bid to justify the ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to create a climate of fear in order to suppress democratic rights in the US itself.

“The exposure of the latest alleged plot has coincided with an unprecedented political crisis for the administration. With the president’s standing in the polls falling to record lows and US military casualties in Iraq increasing as the quagmire in the occupied country deepens, the political motive for unveiling another supposed terrorist threat from within is abundantly clear.”

The Fort Dix suspects allegedly came to the attention of authorities after one of them was fingered by a Circuit City store manager while requesting to dub a terrorism training videotape from VHS to DVD. This bungling is reminiscent of the actions of the so-called 9/11 hijackers (all of them guided US intelligence assets), and suggests low-level and amateurish “patsies”, guided and set up by larger forces.

This foiled “spectacular” terror plot comes shortly after the bizarre Virginia Tech massacre (which, perhaps coincidentally, bears striking similarities to other “manchurian candidate” incidents such as the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley) successfully sparked fear across the country, and ignited new calls from citizens to “make our children safe”.

The clear political beneficiary of both the Fort Dix and V Tech episodes are the same: Homeland Security.

Read more »

Oh what a shock.

The Department of Homeland Security is breaking privacy laws by failing to tell the public all the ways it uses personal information to target passengers boarding flights entering or leaving the United States, according to a draft government report.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report to be released tomorrow, says DHS’s Customs and Border Protection agency has never publicly disclosed all the sources of data such as name, credit card number and travel history that it uses to detect passengers who may pose a security risk.

“CBP’s current disclosures do not fully inform the public about all of its systems for prescreening aviation passenger information, nor do they explain how CBP combines data in the prescreening process, as required by law,” the report says. “As a result, passengers are not assured that their privacy is protected during the international prescreening process.”

More at the Washington Post

A little post from Joe…….thanks Joe!

Yes, our government is supposed to plan for “what if” occurrences. There was a plan from the 1930s that foresaw war with England and how we would have to invade Canada as a result. What ifs are usually good to think of…however, this gives me the creeps

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration and key senators are struggling to agree on draft legislation to secure the U.S.-Mexico border before putting millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship that could take 13 years.

Even then, immigrants would have to leave the country and pay large fines before gaining legal status.

Officials familiar with the discussions say that despite concessions by both Republicans and Democrats, a final agreement may not come before the Senate opens debate on the issue next week - if at all.

Still, the outlines of a possible deal have taken shape in almost daily secret talks attended by two members of President Bush’s Cabinet. As contemplated, the proposal would bar undocumented immigrants from gaining legal status until the administration beefs up border security and implements a high-tech identification system for temporary workers. The same trigger would apply to new immigrants seeking temporary visas as guest workers. Such measures are expected to take up to two years.

Even after that, officials said it could take more than a decade before the 12 million men, women and children estimated to be in the U.S. illegally could get permanent legal status, or green cards. First the government would clear an existing legal immigration backlog, a task estimated to take eight years. Then the government would begin processing green cards for the 12 million here illegally, expected to take another five years.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

By a large margin, Americans feel the Bush administration has tipped the balance of security against liberty too far towards security, a new UPI/Zogby poll shows.

But the public remains closely divided on the president’s most controversial security programs, favoring by small margins warrantless wiretaps against terror suspects and the broad mining by federal agencies of personal data about U.S. citizens.

When asked whether the Bush administration had “found the right balance between personal security and personal freedom,” only one-third (33 percent) agreed. Nearly half (49 percent) agreed instead that the “administration has tipped the balance too far towards security.”

Only 7 percent agreed with the third option, that the balance was tipped “too far towards freedom, leaving our security weak.”

Asked about specific security programs run by the administration, Americans were generally more supportive of those targeting foreigners.

Two-thirds (66 percent) agreed that the U.S. government had the right to collect personal data about foreign airline passengers coming to the country, which has been a source of ongoing friction with the European Union.

Fifty-five percent agreed that the Terrorism Surveillance Program was “a necessary and legal tool to protect Americans,” and 42 percent disagreed. Under the program, the National Security Agency conducts court-authorized but warrantless surveillance of international communications by Americans with suspected terrorists.

read more at UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Homeland Security…..keepin us safe!!!! Heckuva job Skeletor!!! He still has a job because????? Oh yah…..he’s loyal. Notice the “insufficient detention capacity”….. I feel another Haliburton contract coming on!

WASHINGTON –Teams assigned to make sure foreigners ordered out of the United States actually leave have a backlog of more than 600,000 cases and can’t accurately account for the fugitives’ whereabouts, the government reported Monday.

The report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that the effectiveness of teams assigned to find the fugitives was hampered by “insufficient detention capacity, limitations of an immigration database and inadequate working space.”

Even though more than $204 million was allocated for 52 fugitive operations teams since 2003, a backlog of 623,292 cases existed as of August of 2006, the report said.

The number of illegal immigrants in the United States has been estimated at between 11.5 million and 12 million. About 5.4 percent of them are believed to be “fugitive aliens,” those who have failed to leave the country after being ordered out.

Read more at Boston.com

WASHINGTON, March 8 (UPI) — Lawmakers are concerned about a Department of Homeland Security computer system that mines personal information about U.S. citizens as it looks for terrorists.

The U.S. Homeland Security Department is testing the ADVISE — for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement — system, which the Government Accountability Office is investigating at the request of U.S. Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., to see if it violates privacy laws, The Washington Times reported.

Data the system can mine include credit card records, telephone and Internet usage, medical records and travel and banking information.

The newspaper said the system employs the same data-mining techniques developed by the Depaertment of Defense’s Total Information Awareness project banned by Congress in 2003 because of privacy violations.

In January, lawmakers introduced legislation that would require federal agencies to report to Congress on data-mining use.

“Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward,” U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told the Times.

Source

Ahhhhhh given their response to Katrina, I’m guessing this would be a circus. Especially if Michael Chertoff is involved. Someone tell me again why he still has a job???? All this will do is spread fear….. a new threat for Americans to think about and how very lucky we are to have this administration to keep the terrorists away from us! Whew….Lordy Lordy….thank you for giving us George W. Bush to watch over this great nation! Hey, here’s a thought for ya. How about you try to figure out how to do something about all our soldiers getting blown to bits OVER THERE by IEDs? Like bringing them home!

I think Jim Moran has it right……

“Sometimes I have a sense they-re watching too many reruns of -24′,” said Rep. Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat who serves on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. “They need to get a grip. We don-t have IEDs here. They-re creating a state of fear beyond what is helpful.”

Feb. 23, 2007 - The White House is staging a high-level exercise Saturday to test responses to the prospect of a massive domestic terrorist attack involving IEDs (improvised explosive devices)-the same deadly roadside bombs that have been used by insurgents against the U.S. military in Iraq.

White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend will preside over a group of senior officials-including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence John (Mike) McConnell-as they attempt to deal with the latest nightmarish scenario cooked up by government counterterrorism planners.

As part of the exercise, the officials will be handed a thick binder which lays out a scenario involving simultaneous terror attacks by “sleeper cells” of 20 to 25 individuals each dispersed in five cities across the country: New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. The officials will then be tested on how they direct their respective agencies to respond. “We-ve designed this to overtax the system, to push the system beyond the breaking point,” said one senior administration official familiar with planning for the event, who declined to be identified talking about it before it takes place.

Read more here

In March 2003, when the world’s attention was focused on U.S. soldiers heading to Baghdad, twelve senior officials in the Bush administration gathered around a long oak conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex. They were meeting to put the final touches on a proposed legislative package that would address what was perhaps the most dangerous vulnerability the country faced after 9/11: unprotected chemical plants close to densely populated areas.

The package was the product of nearly a year’s worth of work led by Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security (previously head of the White House Office of Homeland Security), and Christine Todd Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Both had been governors of northeastern states (Ridge of Pennsylvania and Whitman of New Jersey) with a large number of chemical plants, and this only increased their concern about leaving such facilities unprotected. EPA staff felt such fears even more acutely: agency data showed that at least 700 sites across the country could potentially kill or injure 100,000 or more people if attacked.

The basic elements of the legislation were simple: the EPA would get authority to regulate the security of chemical sites, and, as a first step, plants would submit plans for lowering their risks. One man present at the meeting, Bob Bostock, who was homeland security adviser to the Environmental Protection Agency, was relieved to see that something was finally being done. “We knew that these facilities had large enough quantities of dangerous chemicals to do significant harm to populations in these areas,” he says.

No one present was prepared for what came next: the late arrival of an unexpected visitor, Philip Perry, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Perry, a tall, balding man who bears a slight resemblance to Ari Fleischer without the glasses, was brusque and to the point. The Bush administration was not going to support granting regulatory authority over chemical security to the EPA. “If you send up this legislation,” he told the gathering, “it will be dead on arrival on the Hill.”

Continue reading at the Washington Monthly