CQ Behind the Lines

From CQ Homeland Security

Behind the Lines for Friday, June 17, 2011 — 3 P.M. By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly The little engines that shouldn't: CBP's X-raying of border-crossing trains has prompted $400 million in fines for unwitting U.S. railroads for carrying contraband . . . Grasping at straws: National Association of Letter Carriers suggests outfitting postal trucks with sensors so carriers can thwart bioterror attacks . . . This week's worry: FBI warns of al Qaeda plot to assassinate key government and private-sector figures with mail bombs. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage. --------------------------------- CBP's X-raying of every entering train has prompted $400 million in fines against U.S. railroads, "held responsible for . . . anything criminals cram into the boxcars and tankers as they clickety-clack through Mexico," The Associated Press' Martha Mendoza leads. Airport administrators tell The Daily Caller's C.J. Ciaramella, meantime, that TSA aborted the option allowing airports to privatize screening "with little warning and without adequate justification" — while the sponsor of a Texas state bill criminalizing TSA "gropers" tells The New York Times' Timothy Williams: "We've gone from prudent caution to ridiculous excess." Homies: Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, is badgering DHS's Coast Guard about stopping smugglers and traffickers from exploiting Falcon Lake on the Mexico border, Farrah Fazal relates for Weslaco's KRGV 5 News. A "financial riptide" is about to hit the Coast Guard, and that means "major cuts are looming for some local security programs, including at Port Canaveral," Orlando's WFTV 9 News warns. Continuing a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants, ICE has notified 1,000 companies in all 50 states that their hiring records will be audited, The Wall Street Journal's Miriam Jordan reports. Feds: Newly anointed al Qaeda captain Ayman al-Zawahiri "is nothing like Osama bin Laden," departing Defense dean Robert M. Gates tells The Washington Examiner's Hayley Peterson — as The Washington Post's Joby Warrick and Mary Beth Sheridan foresee "a more dysfunctional a Qaeda under the truculent Egyptian." The FBI is warning of an al Qaeda-inspired plot to assassinate key government and private sector individuals with mail bombs, IPT News notes — and check FOX News' Judson Berger on the "al Qaeda hit list." Before agreeing to extend FBI chief Robert Mueller's 10-year term, Congress should review his flawed anthrax mailings investigation, author David Willman urges in a Boston Globe op-ed. The terrorist described as the linchpin in the Osama bin Laden hunt had rejoined al Qaeda after the Bush administration released him from a secret CIA secret prison, AP's Adam Goldman reveals. State and local: The Delaware Senate passed a bill this week requiring contractors working for the public sector to use DHS's E-Verify to screen employees for documentation, The Wilmington News Journal notes. Rebutting a Los Angeles Times op-ed by two lawmakers urging that use of E-Verify to weed out undocumented job applicants be made mandatory, a lawyer writes that the database fails more than half the time at IDing illegal workers. ICE agents earlier this month searched the home of a fired South Carolina State Trooper, Greenville's WHNS 21 News notes. Along with state and local securicrats, TSA conducted on Tuesday the nation's largest-yet VIPR security exercise "throughout 5,000 square miles in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia," The Marietta (Ohio) Times tells. Bugs 'n bombs: The president of the National Association of Letter Carriers suggests outfitting postal trucks with sensors so carriers can thwart bioterror attacks, Cybercast News Service's Eric Scheiner relates. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., is reintroducing legislation intended to boost security measures at the country's bioresearch labs, Global Security Newswire notes. Though a new report shows that 70 percent of confiscated weapons submitted for tracing in Mexico originated from the United States, critics call the figure politically motivated, The Christian Science Monitor spotlights — while The Wall Street Journal sees ATF agents themselves resisting a much-decried cross-border arms sale sting operation. Islamabad's pursuit of a twofold nuclear arsenal expansion has significantly increased the stockpile's exposure to extremists, Global Security Newswire notes. Chasing the dime: Hess LNG has withdrawn a controversial proposal to locate a liquefied natural gas plant in Fall River, Mass., which opponents feared could become a prime terror target, The Boston Globe reports. Genetec hopes designation of its Omnicast video surveillance system as a Qualified Anti-Terrorism Technology may yield limited liability for third-party claims arising from counterterror-related deployment, Info4Security informs — as Semiconductor Today sees Skyworks Solutions launching high-power filters for homeland security and other transceiver applications. Aon Risk Solutions, meanwhile, for the first time includes political violence, strikes, riots, war and civil war as factors in its expanded 2011 Terrorism and Political Violence Map, Business Insurance informs. Close air support: Boston screeners' detection of trace nitrates — from a grad student's Hong Kong river mud sample, it turns out — shuttered two gates at Logan Airport, the Globe reports. TSA screeners tell KITV 4 News "an unsafe situation" persisted at Honolulu International for months because they feared blowback for reporting problems. A US Airways employee was taken into custody Tuesday after sneaking aboard a flight from Florida to Charlotte and then flying to Pittsburgh, The Charlotte Observer observes — and view WOSC 9 News' slideshow illustrating recent security flaps at the Charlotte air hub. "Who knew that the lone flight attendant on the first aerial hijacking of a U.S. passenger plane would be alive, well, and living in Manitowoc, Wis., 50 years later?" the L.A. Times profiles. Drivin' that train: "The beneficiaries of [TSA's] bureaucratic incompetence have been Amtrak and the intercity bus companies. Although they instituted their own moronic identification requirements in 2002," Cap'n Transit comments. After a bomb scare on D.C.'s Metro this week, Senate transportation overseers "said protection for trains and buses is seriously lacking," Capitol News Connection takes note. The perpetrator of the arson of a railway security equipment box is an anarchist group that has boasted of it on the Internet, Finnish police tell Helsingen Sanomat. New surveillance cameras and door locks are intended to bolster security on Minsk's recently bombed subway, TVR hears the system's new chief declaring. Courts and rights: A special agent with ICE has been arrested after an investigation found her illegally transferring federal documents "to family members and associates with ties to drug trafficking organizations," The Phoenix New Times tells. A Zimbabwean refugee has been sentenced to four months in prison "for telling a tall tale to customs agents that involved a bomb, radiation poisoning and George W. Bush's presidential library," The Toronto Sun says. "Advocates for a Canadian-Sudanese man once stranded in Khartoum for six years over suspected al Qaeda links yesterday asked the United Nations to remove his name from its terror watch list, Agence France-Presse reports. Over there: The U.S.-Pakistan security relationship has "sunk to its lowest level" since the two countries agreed to cooperate after 9/11, endangering counterterrorism programs that depend on the partnership, the Post leads. "Al Qaeda members are being killed with more success than ever before; there has been more success against top al Qaeda operatives in the last two months than in the last 10 years," Technorati spotlights. Security experts have been warning for years that corruption in South Africa is allowing terrorists to get documents to hide their identities, AP reports. The Pakistani government is allegedly allowing terrorist and militant leader Fazle-ur-Rahman Khalil to live unmolested on its soil, International Business Times relates. Kulture Kanyon: Former DHS secretary Tom Ridge may want to do a little more preparation for his next appearance on the "Colbert Report," The Mother Nature Network mentions. "Some have called the opera anti-Semitic, or accuse it of rationalizing or legitimizing an act of terrorism," The St. Louis Jewish Light relates, in re: John Adams' "The Death of Klinghoffer." The Heritage Foundation "is hardly known for producing horror movies, but "33 Minutes," an hourlong doc touting missile defenses, "is the unintentional exception to that rule," Blogcritics comments. "The data proves once and one for all that opening a terror-themed wide release is a battle as unwinnable as a Middle Eastern quagmire," The Hollywood Reporter (sub. req.) pronounces, in re: "Body of Lies" (Warner Bros.). "Is it terrorism if it's necessary?" a Comics Alliance poster ponders of "X-Men: First Class" (20th Century Fox), writing "as someone who has enjoyed Magneto over the years, whether as a super-terrorist or as a symbol for young mutants." Book Nook: Director Ed Zwick will adapt Vince Flynn's novel "American Assassin" (Atria), a prequel showing how series hero Mitch Rapp evolved into "a ruthless hunter of terrorists for the CIA," Collider.com recounts. In Mark Alpert's "The Omega Theory" (Touchstone), a thriller focused on "the new age of terrorism from self-righteous fanatics," Iran detonates a "nuclear bomb that, for a microsecond, splits the fabric of the universe," The Lincoln Journal Star reviews. Darryl Hurd's book "The Enemy Next Door" (Tate) looks at a fictional terror cell in Roanoke and training camps on along the Blue Ridge Parkway," while considering his hometown "as a potential target of domestic terrorists," WFIR AM 960 spotlights. "Time may yet yield a long work of fiction that serves as the quintessential Global War on Terrorism novel, or even a few that deserve such a label, but it is not inevitable," Matt Gallagher muses in The Atlantic. Block that metaphor: "An armed bomb carrying enough C-4 plastic explosive to create a crater the size of one city block has been installed somewhere in George Washington Carver High School on the south side of Chicago," The Onion reports. "School officials proudly announced the installation of the bomb at a board meeting Monday. 'For years I've been telling the newspaper and television reporters that our public schools are a ticking time bomb,' said Illinois's Secretary of Education Milton Hekilj. 'We've always known that our schools were a ticking time bomb. And while we've never known how to solve the problem, we've always known that "ticking time bomb" was the perfect metaphor for it. I commend the administration of Carver High School for making that metaphor a tangible reality.' Funds for the installation of the bomb were diverted from school tutoring and midnight basketball programs. Carver's principal said such programs only gave students a false sense of hope, when in reality their futures are horribly bleak." Source: CQ Homeland Security --------------------------------- Other CQ Roll Call Products CQ Floor Video CQ.com CQ Weekly CQ Today CQ Amendment Text CQ BillTrack CQ Budget Tracker CQ Energy & Climate CQ HealthBeat CQ Homeland Security CQ Hot Docs CQ House Action Reports CQ LawTrack CQ MoneyLine CQ StateTrack CQ Politics Roll Call See all CQ Roll Call products Rob Margetta, CQ Homeland Security Editor Arwen Bicknell, Behind the Lines Editor Published by CQ Roll Call To sign up for CQ Roll Call's free newsletters, click here. Source: CQ Homeland Security Copyright © 2011 CQ Roll Call. All rights reserved.