ConservaPundit

Serious news: 2 Saudi men arrested in Tampa after boarding a SCHOOL BUS

From Fox News-- http://www.foxnews.com/story/...,2933,196376,00.html

2 Saudi Men Arrested After Boarding School Bus in Florida Sunday, May 21, 2006

TAMPA, Florida — Two Saudi men were held without bond Sunday after they were arrested for boarding a school bus full of children, authorities said.

Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, were charged with misdemeanor trespassing and were being held at Orient Road Jail after a judge said Saturday she wanted more background information on them.

The two men arrived in the country six months ago on student visas and are enrolled at the English Language Institute at the University of South Florida.

Investigators said they boarded the school bus Friday, sat down and began speaking in Arabic. Their behavior concerned the driver, a substitute, who alerted the school district.

The men were asked why they boarded the bus, and sheriff's spokesman J.D. Callaway said they gave different answers: They wanted to enroll in an easier English language program than the one at USF, they wanted to see a high school, and they thought it would be fun.

A friend tried to bail Almanajam and Alsidran out of jail, but Circuit Judge Monica Sierra decided to detain the pair. She scheduled a Tuesday hearing and asked that an Arabic interpreter be present.

Ahmed Bedier, director of the Central Florida Council on American-Islamic Relations, said it sounded like a cultural mix-up.

"The only reason (this happened) is because of who they are, and that's wrong," he said.

Mexico calls US immigration laws xenophobic, yet bars non-natives from public, private work

Mexico Works to Bar Non-Natives From Jobs By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer

If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn't be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn't have been allowed on the force.

Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies "xenophobic," Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.

In the United States, only two posts — the presidency and vice presidency — are reserved for the native born.

In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens.

Foreign-born Mexicans can't hold seats in either house of the congress. They're also banned from state legislatures, the Supreme Court and all governorships. Many states ban foreign-born Mexicans from spots on town councils. And Mexico's Constitution reserves almost all federal posts, and any position in the military and merchant marine, for "native-born Mexicans."

Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges.

Mexico's Interior Department — which recommended the bans as part of "model" city statutes it distributed to local officials — could cite no basis for extending the bans to local posts.

After being contacted by The Associated Press about the issue, officials changed the wording in two statutes to delete the "native-born" requirements, although they said the modifications had nothing to do with AP's inquiries.

"These statutes have been under review for some time, and they have, or are about to be, changed," said an Interior Department official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name.

But because the "model" statues are fill-in-the-blanks guides for framing local legislation, many cities across Mexico have already enacted such bans. They have done so even though foreigners constitute a tiny percentage of the population and pose little threat to Mexico's job market.

The foreign-born make up just 0.5 percent of Mexico's 105 million people, compared with about 13 percent in the United States, which has a total population of 299 million. Mexico grants citizenship to about 3,000 people a year, compared to the U.S. average of almost a half million.

"There is a need for a little more openness, both at the policy level and in business affairs," said David Kim, president of the Mexico-Korea Association, which represents the estimated 20,000 South Koreans in Mexico, many of them naturalized citizens.

"The immigration laws are very difficult ... and they put obstacles in the way that make it more difficult to compete," Kim said, although most foreigners don't come to Mexico seeking government posts.

J. Michael Waller, of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, was more blunt. "If American policy-makers are looking for legal models on which to base new laws restricting immigration and expelling foreign lawbreakers, they have a handy guide: the Mexican constitution," he said in a recent article on immigration.

Some Mexicans agree their country needs to change.

"This country needs to be more open," said Francisco Hidalgo, a 50-year-old video producer. "In part to modernize itself, and in part because of the contribution these (foreign-born) people could make."

Others express a more common view, a distrust of foreigners that academics say is rooted in Mexico's history of foreign invasions and the loss of territory in the 1847-48 Mexican-American War.

Speaking of the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who enter Mexico each year, chauffeur Arnulfo Hernandez, 57, said: "The ones who want to reach the United States, we should send them up there. But the ones who want to stay here, it's usually for bad reasons, because they want to steal or do drugs."

Some say progress is being made. Mexico's president no longer is required to be at least a second-generation native-born. That law was changed in 1999 to clear the way for candidates who have one foreign-born parent, like President Vicente Fox, whose mother is from Spain.

But the pace of change is slow. The state of Baja California still requires candidates for the state legislature to prove both their parents were native born.

This is rich-- Mexico to file lawsuits if "migrants" detained by National Guard

Some Mexicans have also planned to establish a migrant "protection force" to help the migrants...

How long until a Mexican soldier shoots at a National Guardsman, gets killed, and then is martyred? Why is Mexico trying to blame its horrific government and economy, which forces migration to the US, on us? Why does it not own up to the fact that it, and not the US, encourages hispanics to die in the desert? How galling.....

We certainly do live in some f-ed up times.

Dispelling the NSA Surveillance Myths

GEN. Michael Hayden is going to get an early Memorial Day BBQ-ing on Thursday. The CIA director-nominee will appear before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the senators are sure to go ballistic over the National Security Agency's telephone-calling-record database.

Yet, despite the nonsense that the politically motivated mainstream media and the left have been spouting on the NSA program, this critical counterterrorism effort isn't intrusive, illegal - or unnecessary.

Let's start by dispelling some of the more prominent myths perpetuated about the program:

It's intrusive: Wrong. The billions of telephone-calling records voluntarily provided to the NSA by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth are anonymous. This means they're just phone numbers - the caller's names/addresses aren't identified in the calling record.

Moreover, these records include nothing on any of the substance of the phone calls - just the number, the date and duration. This doesn't mean that your phone calls are being monitored by the NSA - or anyone else. That requires a court order.

It's illegal: Wrong. It's perfectly legal for the government to receive this information. These are considered mere business records. In fact, the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that the Fourth Amendment (i.e., the right against unreasonable search and seizure) doesn't include phone-calling records.

In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the court found that the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect calling records because when you voluntarily use the phone, you voluntarily share that info with every telephone company that handles the call along the way to its destination.

It's unnecessary: Wrong. The program is focused on terrorists, especially the al Qaeda threat. While we've made progress in neutralizing al Qaeda, the terrorist group remains dangerous and deadly - and has promised to strike here at home again.

In fact, the decentralization of al Qaeda has made it a more unpredictable (i.e., challenging) target for homeland security. And the bombings in London last July remind us of the increased threat arising from homegrown terrorists.

The most glaring absence in all the uproar is a good example of how this information might be used to prevent a terrorist act right here in the United States.

Suppose the FBI identifies - today - a terrorist suspect (e.g., Terrorist A) located right here in the United States from information received from a foreign intelligence service after a raid on an al Qaeda safe house abroad.

Beyond taking immediate steps to prevent a terrorist attack, one of the first questions that law enforcement is going to want to answer is whether Terrorist A is working alone, or as part of a cell or larger group operating here.

There are a couple of ways of determining this. One method is by looking at how - and with whom - Terrorist A communicates. This is often referred to as "communications-network analysis."

But, while you might be able to identify with whom Terrorist A is communicating by monitoring his phone calls once you've determined his terrorist ties, you still don't know with whom else he communicated with in the past.

That's why the NSA wanted the calling-record database. With it, law-enforcement agents can determine the phone numbers of Terrorist A's previous contacts. Equally importantly, they can find out with whom else Terrorist A's contacts have talked with.

Through analysis of Terrorist A's (and associates') calling patterns using NSA's database and supercomputers, officials can develop a schematic of the terrorist organization's structure, members - even chain of command.

In other words, they can connect the dots.

No telling what a difference such a counterterrorism program might have had in preventing 9/11, if such network analysis had been done on the communications patterns of the al Qaeda hijackers.

Sad to say, we live in a time when we should no longer be shocked at the lengths the mainstream media, or other irresponsible leakers of classified information, will go to advance their anti-Bush political agenda - even if it means harming our national security.

We need to remind ourselves that it isn't by chance that we haven't had a terrorist attack here in the United States in almost five years. It's because we've established a significant counterterrorism program both at home and abroad, including this NSA effort.

The White House took on the CIA, and the CIA won

The Datamining Scare-- Another Nonthreat to Your Civil Liberties

The Bush Administration's Big Brother operation is at it again--or so media reports and Democrats this week would have us believe. We suspect, however, that this political tempest will founder on the good sense of the American people much like the earlier one did.

Last December, the New York Times reported that after 9/11 the National Security Agency began listening to overseas phone calls of suspected terrorists, including calls placed from or received inside the U.S. This was supposed be a scandal because the tapping was done without a warrant from something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But as the debate wore on, it became clear that the 1978 FISA statute didn't block a President's power to allow such national-security wiretaps, and that most Americans expected their government to eavesdrop on terror suspects.

Now comes a sensationalist USA Today front-pager suggesting an even larger scandal. The government is "amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans--most of whom aren't suspected of any crime." Worse, reporter Leslie Cauley writes, while President Bush had suggested after the wiretapping story that "domestic call records" (her words) were still private, we now know that's "not the case."

Democrats are outraged, or at least they pretend to be. And major papers have joined the chorus, with the Washington Post calling the newly reported program a "massive intrusion on personal privacy." We're prepared to be outraged, too, if somebody would first bother to explain in detail what the problem is.

Let's start by debunking Ms. Cauley's piece of journalistic sleight of hand. President Bush never suggested that domestic call "records" were private. He has said actual warrantless surveillance was restricted to conversations that involved an overseas party: "The government does not listen [our emphasis] to domestic phone calls without court approval." Datamining and wiretapping are not the same thing. So much for the "Bush lied" angle to this story.

Yes, Mr. Bush could have volunteered the larger "datamining" details at the time. But no President is obliged to divulge every secret program, especially one central to war-fighting. Had Mr. Bush done so, we doubt Democrats and the press corps would have sat back and said OK, thanks, let's move on--not when they see his poll numbers and sense a chance to take back Congress this autumn.

And once it's clear that telephone records are all we're talking about here, the rest of this alleged scandal melts away. Nobody has suggested one single call has been listened to as part of the program reported this week by USA Today. Rather, the datamining appears to keep track, after the fact, of most calls placed to and from a great many phone numbers in the U.S. In other words, the scary government database contains the same information you see on your monthly phone bill--slightly less, in fact, since names aren't attached to numbers and never will be unless government computers detect activity suspicious enough to warrant some being singled out of billions of others.

And what might the government do with these records? Well, it might use them to break up a suspected terror plot--presumably after requesting a surveillance warrant for any future domestic calls it actually wants to listen to (nobody has suggested otherwise). As important, the database will enable us to respond much more effectively to the next terrorist attack. Once the ringleader or leaders are identified, this information will make it much easier to track down any remaining comrades and prevent them from committing future crimes.

In short, the database is utterly non-invasive in itself and merely provides information for law enforcement to use, with warrants whenever necessary. By using this technology to find terrorists in haystacks before they can strike, the government can afford not to resort to the much more heavy-handed inspection and inconvenience practiced by necessity in, say, Israel. Liberals who object to datamining should wait until they see the "massive intrusion on personal privacy" that Americans will demand if the U.S. homeland gets hit again.

Alas, even some Republicans are buying into the notion that datamining is cause for alarm. Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter has threatened to subpoena the major U.S. phone companies to explain why they've been cooperating with the government. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein predicts "a major constitutional confrontation" over Fourth Amendment guarantees against "unreasonable search and seizure." And Michigan's John Conyers--who would take over House Judiciary if Democrats win in November--wants a bill to ensure that phone records are collected within the confines of FISA.

But since the database doesn't involve any wiretapping, FISA doesn't apply. The FISA statute specifically says its regulations do not cover any "process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing." As to Ms. Feinstein's invocation of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has already held (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that the government can legally collect phone numbers since callers who expect to be billed by their phone company have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" concerning such matters.

So the law appears to be on the Bush Administration's side here. And so does public opinion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll yesterday found that 63% of those surveyed approve of the database program. That's similar to the public's reaction to the warrantless wiretapping controversy, and helps explain why the President's critics on surveillance issues rarely have the courage of their professed civil libertarian convictions.

Instead, they will quibble endlessly over procedural formalities while conceding the broad policy goals. The chutzpah prize on this score goes to Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, whose position on wiretapping is that we should definitely be listening to al Qaeda but that Mr. Bush has committed an impeachable offense by doing it the wrong way. Republicans would love to see a Democratic Presidential nominee take that proposition into the 2008 election.

Most Americans seem to be cooler customers, or perhaps they can sort substance from mere political opportunism. After all, even most of the Democratic critics of datamining don't say they'd stop it. They just want to see it "investigated" and supervised--by them and their fellows in Congress, so they can pound away at the President without having to take responsibility for keeping America safe.

Perhaps Americans outside Washington understand that it's probably not an accident that the homeland hasn't been attacked again since 9/11, and that maybe--just maybe--the aggressive surveillance policies of the Bush Administration are one reason.

Liberals love to find root causes, except in the case of illegal immigration

Why is their no universal health care in the US? We had to look at the root causes, and-- bam-- once again it was "social injustice".

Yet when it comes to illegal immigration, liberals would rather stage gigantic rallies for "reform", giving illegals American flags to wave and Spanish versions of the national anthem, than discover the "root cause" of illegal immigration. THey do this so they can push to allow all illegals into this country. And they do that for one major reason: hispanics are a minority and overwhelmingly support these liberal fanatics politically.

But here there is a major root cause, and it is a sinister one. What we have occuring south of the border is a crime against humanity. We have the Mexican government outsourcing their problems (poor Mexicans) to the US. The Mexican government encourages their poorest to risk their lives to come here and send money back to their families, and they do it because they have failed to take care of their own people. Encouraging illegals to come here takes the pressure off the Mexican government to do anything about their own wickedness. They are the root cause not only of our nation's immigration problems but, much more importantly, of their own people's tremendous suffering.

But don't expect the libs to discover this truth. Expect them to push for giving illegals rights that others played by the rules to get. Expect them to cater to the unions these immigrants belong to. Do not expect them to improve their lives by finding the root cause, for suffering is what liberals exploit-- it is how they gain and keep power.

In my view, the US needs to do three things. One, our government needs to find something to do with the illegals here-- give those that are good citizens amnesty, give the others that do not want to be part of this country the boot. Two, they need to actually enforce US immigration law. Three, and most importantly, they need to push for reform in the Mexican government. Agitate, slap on sanctions, put tariffs on Mexican goods. Whatever it takes. Mexico is dying because of illegal immigration, not just the US.