Advocate uses texting to warn of AZ crime sweeps

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Sun Jan 3, 6:50 pm ET

PHOENIX – An advocate for immigrant and civil rights has started using text messages to warn residents about crime sweeps by a high-profile Arizona sheriff.

Lydia Guzman, director of the nonprofit immigrant advocacy group Respect/Respeto, is the trunk of a sophisticated texting tree designed to alert thousands of people within minutes to the details of the sweeps, which critics contend are an excuse to round up illegal immigrants.

Guzman said the messages are part of an effort to protect Latinos and others from becoming victims of racial profiling by sheriff's deputies. Deputies have been accused of stopping Hispanics, including citizens and legal immigrants, for minor traffic violations to check their immigration status.

"Everyone is responsible for sending it out to their own networks, and that is how it spreads like wildfire," Guzman said of the text messages.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has repeatedly said his deputies do not engage in racial profiling, and he publicizes the details of his crime sweeps ahead of time. He said he suspects the real goal of the text messages is to help illegal immigrants avoid arrest.

"This little group of people is (in favor of) open borders, and they don't like what I am doing. That is the bottom line," Arpaio said. "But it isn't interfering with our operations because every time we do it, we still arrest a good number of people, including illegal aliens."

Arpaio has conducted 13 sweeps since March 2008, and deputies have arrested 669 people, about half of whom were held on immigration violations.

The sheriff said his opponents are walking a line between exercising free speech and breaking the law by helping immigration violators avoid detection. He said the texts are possibly even tipping off human-smuggling organizations.

Guzman said she sends the messages to a wide range of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, Copwatch and various immigrant-rights groups such as Somos America and Puente. She concedes that some who receive the text messages likely use the information to avoid being caught and deported.

Andy Hessick, a constitutional law professor at Arizona State University, said sending warnings to people who might be subject to racial profiling would likely be considered free speech. But sending messages with the specific intent of warning illegal immigrants to help them avoid arrest could be akin to being an accomplice after a crime.

David Hudson Jr., a First Amendment scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said the messages are protected free speech because they are merely letting people know what Arpaio is doing, similar to publicizing DUI checkpoints and speed traps or flashing your headlights when police are nearby.

"That is not unlawful," he said. "It's the conveyance of truthful information."
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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com

They were CIA agents! They were in Afghanistan to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism and to prop up the U.S. puppet government of Hamid Karzai. CIA=Central Imperialism Apparatus.

8 U.S. CIA agents killed in Afghan suicide blast

BY JONATHON BURCH, REUTERS

DECEMBER 30, 2009 9:46 PM
(from antiwar.com via The Ottawa, Canada Herald)

KABUL — Insurgents intensified their campaign against military targets and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, killing eight U.S. CIA agents at a base and four Canadian servicemen on patrol and a journalist accompanying them.

U.S. officials said the dead Americans — killed in a suicide bombing on a military base in southeastern Khost province on Wednesday — were CIA agents.

It was one of the highest foreign non-military death tolls in the eight-year war against the Islamist Taliban.

The four Canadians and the journalist from the Calgary Herald were killed when their armoured vehicle was hit by a bomb in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, the Canadian Defence Ministry said.

The base in Khost province, Forward Operating Base Chapman, was engaged in reconstruction projects, a key part of U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy to stabilize the country.

Some people were wounded in the explosion, defence officials said, but no U.S. or NATO troops were among them.

Asked whether the suicide blast occurred inside the base, one official said: "That's my understanding." Another senior official confirmed the attack involved an explosive vest.

U.S. President Barack Obama is sending 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan in an attempt to stem the violence, with NATO allies also contributing thousands more.

Washington has pledged a "civilian surge", adding hundreds of U.S. experts to support work on development projects that aim to undermine support for the Taliban and other insurgents.

An Afghan army official on Wednesday said the United States had pledged $16 billion to spend on training and equipping Afghanistan's army and air force.

The blast in Kandahar, about four km (2.5 miles) outside the city, struck the Canadian patrol as it was visiting community reconstruction projects, officials said.

The journalist killed was Michelle Lang, 34, on assignment for the Canwest News Service. She was on on her fist assignment in Afghanistan and had been in the country since Dec. 11.

The attack brought Canada's military deaths in Afghanistan to 138. Canada has a 2,800-strong military mission in Afghanistan, but the mission has become increasingly unpopular at home and it is scheduled to be withdrawn at the end of 2011.

UNPRECEDENTED VIOLENCE

The Taliban's armed campaign is at its bloodiest level since the militants, in power from the mid-1990s, were overthrown by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.

Civilian and military casualty tolls have reached record levels. Suicide attackers even targetted United Nations employees at a guesthouse in Kabul, killing five.

Many civilians working outside Kabul have retreated into army bases as the security situation has deteriorated. Bases are heavily fortified and require extensive security checks to enter.

Foreign aid agencies warned earlier this year that the shift into the military bases, and the use of military personnel to carry out development projects, risked a dangerous blurring of the boundaries between troops and civilians.

But intensified activity by the U.S.-led force has also bred resentment among Afghans, particularly as local civilians have been killed in several attacks.

Hundreds protested on Wednesday against the killing of 10 civilians, mostly teenagers, in a raid by foreign forces that NATO forces said occurred in a battle in which nine insurgents were killed.

That attack heightened tensions between President Hamid Karzai's government, under pressure since his disputed re-election last August and NATO. Karzai condemned this week's civilian deaths and ordered an investigation.

Khost is one of the areas of Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, and most foreigners there are troops or working under military protection.

In September, a suicide bomber rammed a car into a military convoy of foreign forces there, killing one American.

© Copyright (c) Reuters

Trivial sidenote: The Orlando connection to this is that the Israeli intelligence agent who lured Vanunu to that hotel room in Rome was the daughter of a local man who owned a very well-known shoe store and was the spokesman in commercials for a local tire company who popularized the slogan, "Tires Ain't Pretty!"


Israeli police arrest nuclear whistleblower Vanunu

Israeli police arrest nuclear whistleblower Vanunu for violating terms of prison release

AMY TEIBEL
AP News

Dec 29, 2009 09:49 EST

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was ordered to be put under house arrest Tuesday after being charged with violating a condition of his 2004 release from an Israeli prison.


Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Vanunu met with "a number of foreigners," something he was ordered not to do for fear he might divulge classified information.

Vanunu, who has been charged with violating this order before, flashed a "V" sign and unleashed a rambling tirade against the "impotent" Jewish state as he entered a Jerusalem court.

His lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, said Vanunu was arrested because he has a Norwegian girlfriend whom police have already interrogated.

A court spokesman said Vanunu would be released from jail Tuesday evening and was ordered to stay under house arrest through Thursday.

Vanunu was a former low-level technician at an Israeli nuclear plant who leaked details and pictures of the operation to the Sunday Times of London in 1986.

Israeli intelligence agents kidnapped him in Rome and brought him back to Israel to stand trial. He served 18 years in prison before being freed, but he is not allowed to leave the country.

Upon his release in 2004, Vanunu was banned from leaving the country and having unauthorized contact with foreigners.

Following a policy that it calls "nuclear ambiguity," Israel has never acknowledged or denied having a nuclear weapons program. But experts concluded from the material that Vanunu divulged that Israel had the world's sixth-largest nuclear arsenal.

i found this mildly amusing except for the violence. i have heard of anarchists and autonomists in Germany and Italy doing the same thing. If not perhaps for the bad luck of running into an off-duty officer as they were lamming they might have gotten away with it; although given the fact that Wal-Marts have dozens of ccc inside and out they might have been caught eventually.

Police: Accused shoplifters cause chaos at Walmart

35 mins ago
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – Chattanooga police said a couple they believe tried to steal a cart full of TVs and a computer caused chaos at a Walmart. According to a news release, Officer Josh Wright was off duty when he saw a man trying to force his way past a greeter with about $2,000 worth of stolen goods Sunday night. Wright displayed his badge, but the man said it was fake and tried to force his way past him. Wright then tackled the suspect and arrested him.

Then the suspect's wife, feigned a heart attack and said she did not know her husband.
After a witness told Wright the couple had been together in the store, the wife followed the witness into the parking lot and attacked her. The witness stabbed her in the arm with a pocket knife, and the wife had to be treated at a local hospital.

The male suspect was charged with theft over $1,000 and assault on a police officer. Charges against the wife were pending.

It is obviously to everyone now that energetics needs the revolutionary changes. Energetics based on nonrenewable energy resources (oil, coal, gas) have to be replaced, sooner or later, by energy based on the inexhaustible sources. Although two-thirds of the world's electricity is still generated by thermal power stations working on fossil fuels, which are to a great extent responsible for the adverse environmental effects (global warming, ozone depletion, etc.), almost all developed countries are actively elaborating alternative energy sources.

The solar and wind energy are considered by many as these sources. Indeed, these powers are reliable and highly desired renewable energy sources. But in spite of all this they have significant limitations. Such alternative power plants can't work at night and in case of lack of winds. In order to radically change the structure of power generation in favor of renewable resources we need a stable energy source that has great energy potential.

And that source really exists.